July 31, 2010
2Blowhards is now officially frozen in amber.
One of the best cultureblogs shuts down after 8 years - but leaves the archives up. I think I've had a link to them on my blogroll from the beginning!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)
I'm clawing my eyes out
But it wasn't the opera, it's the dust.
Yesterday I spent much of the day hauling stuff out of my storage unit in the basement, sorting it, and pricing it - yard sale today!
Last night I went to Così fan tutte at the Smith Opera House -- a manageable staging sung in English. One of my immediate colleagues was in the chorus; she said it was more fun than she should be allowed. But I was rubbing my eyes the whole time.
This morning -- yard sale around Pulteney Park, and I didn't even have to organize it! My goal -- get rid of some of this dusty clutter for cash - and toss the rest!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2010
Conan painting goes for $1.5 million
Artdaily.org passes on an AP story -- a Frank Frazetta painting sells for $1.5 million. Click to see.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:37 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2010
A NEW Caravaggio?
L'Osservatore Romano says so - or that a painting of the Martyrdom of St Lawrence is being studied to decide whether it is a Caravaggio or no. This is Caravaggio's 400th anniversary, so the announcement is well-timed.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:02 PM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2010
The Importance of Serifs
Really. Listen to what I tell you.
via Lucius Septimius
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
Oh no, not budget cuts! The theaters will go dark!
I mean, I sympathize. Museums would always rather mount a traveling show that they didn't have to think of or even produce the catalog for than dig into their vaults and think about what they might bring out to show us. As thought the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Wallace (one could go on indefinitely) don't have a lot in the basement.
What brought this to mind was a similar whiny piece in the New York Times last year (sorry, couldn't find it - I thought I'd blogged it but evidently not). Someone from MoMA was saying that it was a great pity but they would just have to do shows of things people hadn't seen lately. Cry me a river. The insurance savings alone will make up for budget cuts, if what I've heard is true.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2010
Oh look! For once the scare word isn't "Medieval"!!
The Soviet penchant for Neanderthal art censorship is alive and well [my bold]
We all know that real, effective state/church censorship is a reflection of the Renaissance (or Early Modern, if you prefer). Nice to see it get blamed on someone else for a change, even if it isn't the poor Cave Men.
Actually the pictures I've been able to find (and just off hand I'm not finding any) are probably more offensive to Russian sensibilities because they combine mockery of Christianity and a Neo-Socialist Realist style - making the Soviet link unmistakable - but I'm just speculating there.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:48 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2010
Obama goes for art
The Onion outdoes itself.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:12 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2010
Nazis, Fascists, and Architects -- and then add Historical Preservationists!
The German Pavilion in Venice's Giardini Publici is used for exhibiting German art at the big Biennale. The original building was put up in 1909 and then hastily Nazified in 1938 and then superficially (i.e., removing swastikas and busts of Hitler and Mussolini) in 1945.
Some architects want it replaced, since "It creates an image of Germany that has nothing to do with the reality of today." Others want to preserve it, of course.
Ms Gaensheimer, who is also the director of Frankfurt's Museum for Modern Art, claims that demolishing the building would be futile. "You can't change history by demolishing architecture. But we can use architecture to preserve our consciousness of history," she said. "Fantastic works of art have been shown in the German pavilion and that is what represents this country," she added.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)
July 9, 2010
Show of fakes and forgeries
The National Gallery in London is having one of those shows in which they admit some of their past mistakes. Click to see some examples.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
July 8, 2010
Ever wonder how art museums moved, say, giant sculptures?
Here's the answer for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Here's the Anish Kapoor the story mentions, and here's the Olafur Eliasson BMW.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
July 7, 2010
Turner's Modern Rome (you know, in ruins) sells for an astonishing amount of money
A painting of Rome by the 19th- century British artist J.M.W. Turner, once owned by a member of the Rothschild family, sold tonight at a London auction for a record 29.7 million pounds ($45.1 million).Turner's 1839 canvas "Modern Rome -- Campo Vaccino," a twilit view of some of the Italian capital's most famous monuments, had been expected to fetch between 12 million pounds and 18 million pounds at a Sotheby's Old Master and Early British Paintings sale. It was bought in the room by the London dealer Hazlitt Gooden and Fox acting on behalf of the Getty Museum.
. . .
The 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter) Turner sold today was the artist's last depiction of Rome and exhibited at the Royal Academy. It was being offered for the first time since 1878, when it was purchased on honeymoon by Hannah Rothschild and her husband, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who later became the U.K.'s Prime Minister.
The couple paid 4,450 guineas -- an old British currency - - for the work, and it hung in the family's country mansion, Mentmore Towers, Buckinghamshire, and their London residences for a century. It was in unrestored condition in its original frame, said the New York-based auction house.
Click and see - the photo is pretty small, but not impossibly so.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:38 PM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2010
Terrible Beauty
Glassblown virus models -- the artist is not being ironic by making beautiful sculptures of viruses. He is alive to their horror. I'm thinking it's something like Bosch. Also interesting - he is aware these are only current approximations of what a virus looks like when it is enlarged.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:14 AM | Comments (0)
July 5, 2010
Recover a Caravaggio, Identify a lurking Velasquez
Can this be true? Sure - it may be.
Yale University, which saw its investments fall about 25 percent in the year ending in June 2009 as the economy tanked, happened upon an appreciating asset in a storage room underneath its art gallery: an oil painting it now attributes to 17th-century Spanish master Diego Velazquez.. . .
The unsigned painting, "The Education of the Virgin," was originally credited to an unknown 17th-century Seville artist. Depicting the Virgin Mary and her mother, it was a gift in 1925 from two wealthy Yale alumni, Henry Hotchkiss Townshend and his brother, Raynham Townshend.
In 2002, when the gallery was preparing for renovation and paintings were transferred to off-site storage, Kanter said the "Virgin" painting caught his eye for being of very high quality.
"But I had no idea what it was," he added.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)
Stolen Caravaggio recovered in Berlin
This sounds like a mystery novel - a Caravaggio painting was stolen from the Odessa (Ukraine) Museum of Western and Eastern Art 2 years ago and has just been recovered in Berlin. Go to the clink - clickable version of the painting.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:55 AM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2010
Prof Soltan, Kim Jong-Il, and Art
Fascinating entry from Professor Soltan on the museology of nihilism.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:42 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2010
Carnivalesque 63
Carnivalesque 63 - an Ancient and Medieval Version!
Do cities that are just NOT THERE any more matter? You bet they do! But how do we show people what was there if there's no there there any more? Go look at what can be done with Antioch on the Orontes.
How do you get extant but really fragile manuscripts out of the library where more than one scholar at a time can use them? Here are some really interesting digitalization examples.
And how do you get the DNA out of a manuscript folio to figure out things about - well, about everything, starting with the sheep herd the page was made from. Well, first you have to convince a librarian that a set of 40-micron diameter holes in the edge of a manuscript is acceptable. Then you have to use Michael Drout's new machine - prototype now available!
Bit players in the grand play of the Fall of the Roman Empire and the eventual emergence of the modern western European nations? Not so fast, buddy! Go read about the Burgundian Civil War and think harder about what makes people(s) central to the story.
Not a bit player at all - the power behind the throne - a new life of the Empress Theodora.
Periodization is always a question. In question? Questionable? But much like bit players and great powers, definition is important, if impossible. Magistra et Mater asks "How late should the late antique go?"
So you didn't make it to Kalamazoo this year? Jonathan Jarrett covered a BUNCH of sessions incredibly thoroughly - here, here, here, and here He's not quite Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake, but hey - most of us aren't.
The most important Kalamazoo news? The Chaucer Blogger steps forward!
And finally, what I think must be the most-forwarded ancient or medieval story of the year -- the lurid cemetary of the Gladiators at York. Men bitten by Tigers! Differential development of right arms! At least three of my students in Greek Art & Architecture this semester forwarded this to me - and it was on every list serve I'm on, too. And then ADM sent it as a suggestion, too - so clearly Gladiators are In the News!
Happy reading!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)
May 31, 2010
Remembering the Fallen
A representation of who we remember on Memorial Day.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:34 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2010
Everybody Draw Muhammad Day?
What's the big deal? My Art 249 students know the chant - At some times, in some places, the depiction of images has been forbidden in Islam. And that includes the Prophet.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:46 PM | Comments (1)
April 29, 2010
How had I missed this blog?
The Digitised Manuscripts Blog - the digitalization project of the British Library. Here's the "about" statement:
The Digitised Manuscripts Blog covers not only the progress of current digitisation projects at the British Library, such as the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, but also more generally all topics associated with generating digital images of manuscripts, making them available to researchers, and pursuing old and new ways of researching digital surrogates of ancient manuscripts.
Their initial project is 250 Greek manuscripts, but there is some interesting discussion in the comments about what manuscripts people would like to see scannedl
A colleague sent me a link to a current entry on the Vatican's decision to go ahead with digitalizing 80,000 manuscripts (40,000,000 manuscript pages, on estimate). Neat blog!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2010
There's a reason they're called boards of TRUSTees
And these people were not to be trusted.
The California Attorney General's office ordered the board members of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which came close to a financial collapse in 2008, to undergo special fiduciary training last year after determining that the museum flouted state law in the way it managed its budget, The Los Angeles Times reported. The museum lost more than $30 million from its investment portfolio over several years, ending up with only $5 million on hand in 2008; it also broke state law when it paid general expenses from restricted endowment funds, according to the newspaper, which obtained a two-page letter sent to the museum by the attorney general's office in November.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:41 AM
March 23, 2010
I went to NYC and drew a lot
I had a great time in New York City - I saw people, ate good food, bought new glasses frames, went to the Met over and over again (that handy out of town membership pays off), and drew a lot. Here are two pages of eyes, with bleed-through from a previous page. Drawing is a great way to study things closely - I wish I had more discipline.
The Mourners and the Belles Heures at the Met were well worth the trip. The Mourners, alabaster figures from the tomb of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgandy, and his wife Margaret of Bavaria, are notionally walking in a funeral procession. They were arranged in double-file in one of the medieval galleries leading to the Lehman Pavilion and the Belles Heures show. They were spectacular examples of late Gothic naturalism - highly detailed figure studies, swathed in heavy cloth. There was enough color left on them to imagine them once being even more vivid.
Here is a really neat website for the Mourners - go, select any mourner, and look at him in detail! Drag and rotate!
The Belles Heures de Jean de France, duc de Berry show was overwhelming. FAR too much to take in. I visited on three successive days and still didn't really do it justice. The Limbourg Brothers were even better than I thought. More about that later.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:20 AM | Comments (1)
March 14, 2010
Nothing like a disbound book of hours to attract medievalists
Like a moth to the candle flame. You see, when I visit a museum or library where a book is on display I usually get to see 2 pages - at whatever place the book happens to be open. But when they take a book apart for conservation there's the opportunity for a big show! Spread it out!
So, I'm headed to NYC the second half of the coming week. Look at this (deeply unimaginatively designed) web page of pages from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM | Comments (1)
March 13, 2010
Yet another cultural property story
Some Scottish MP (as opposed to some member of the Scottish Parliament?) is demanding the return of the Lewis Chessmen. To the Hebrides. *BIG SIGH*
The MP is also annoyed because the British Museum (and all other medievalists) think they were made in Norway, not in the Hebrides.
Yeah, if there's a bigger museum on that island some more people will visit. I say send them an assortment - maybe a dozen. There are something like 80 of them, all told, in the British Museum and in Edinburgh.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:39 AM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2010
Beautiful day for a field trip!
I went along to Cornell as an extra chaperon (the rule is one faculty or staff member per van) with my colleague Lara Blanchard and some student groups (class, club, etc). I dragged my visitor, grad school friend Julie Hofmann, along. We lunch at a good Japanese restaurant in College Town and then we spent all afternoon at the Johnson. Click and see other pictures.
The building is I.M. Pei - who is not only still alive but designed the Johnson's new extension. That wing should open later in the year.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 PM | Comments (0)
Art of the Steal
I want to see this movie - the story of the Barnes Collection move.
The saga of the Barnes over more than 80 years is laid out as a story of initial rejection of Dr. Albert C. Barnes' peerless collection by a philistine establishment, to accumulating envy and subversion, and finally appropriation in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by civic boosters, public officials, and powerful foundations.. . .
Whether you support or oppose the move, these are issues that need to be addressed. Philadelphians don't need another fiscal liability, with the original and authentic Barnes less than five miles away, and sustainable for a fraction of the cost of moving it.
This last point is of particular significance, since the legal basis for moving the Barnes rests entirely on its alleged financial untenability in Merion. But Montgomery County has offered a bond-leaseback arrangement that would make $50 million available to the Barnes at once, at no cost to taxpayers. Lower Merion Township has rezoned the museum so that it can admit up to 150,000 visitors a year, an action not only supported by its neighbors but lobbied for by them. The Barnes itself has salable assets, not covered by its indenture, that could regenerate its endowment. And, were local philanthropists so inclined, the Barnes could be put on easy street for far less than the $68 million raised to save The Gross Clinic, a single painting inferior to scores if not hundreds of works in the Barnes.
Any or all of these options would make the Barnes viable in Merion. But the movers prefer to spend your money instead. In a back-door deal, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized $100 million for move-related construction eight years ago - long before court permission was actually granted.
That next to last paragraph is particularly interesting - the huge fundraising effort to "save" The Gross Clinic - that is, raise a pile of money to buy a painting from one public collection to put into another public collection but prevent it from being sold to a public collection out of town (the Walmart heiress's museum in Arkansas) overshadowed any effort to raise money for the Barnes. Oh, well.
And for a negative review of the film (one that sees the Barnes enterprise as flawed from the beginning), go here. Negative? Really negative:
"We never positioned ourselves as people who were hostile and had any agenda," he says. But his film is hostile and has an agenda. It uses a well-developed set of polemical techniques -- ominous music, imputations of dark motives, ad hominem interviews -- to connect only the dots that make its case.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 AM | Comments (1)
March 3, 2010
Another story of art ransom
Here's another person who tried to sell works back to the collection from which they were stolen, like the story I linked to yesterday. What ARE these people thinking? Does this sometimes work?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2010
Leonardo for Ransom
A fascinating take on how much ransom to ask for a stolen Leonardo, and how it was recovered:
In mid-December 2009, Leonardo's "Madonna of the Yarnwinder," which was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch's collection at Drumlanrig Castle in 2003 and recovered in 2007, was placed on display at the National Gallery of Scotland. The painting, which currently hangs in a room filled with Raphael's and Renaissance masters, will be exhibited at the Gallery for a limited time only. It was last shown at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1991 when it was juxtaposed against a copy that was likely produced by Leonardo Da Vinci's workshop (now in a private collection). A similar visual comparison was made at the Milanese Exhibition at the Burlington Arts Club in 1898 (Nicholas Penny. "Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder" in The Burlington Magazine Edinburgh. National Gallery of Scotland. Vol. 134, No. 1073 Aug., 1992, pp. 542-544).Around the corner from the Gallery at the high court in Edinburgh, the trial has begun of five men, who are accused of organizing a plot to extort money from the Duke of Buccleuch for the safe return of the painting.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:27 AM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2010
I guess I have to go to NYC for Spring Break to see the disbound Belles Heures at the Met.
Look at this. Yikes. 172 folios, displayed floating in air? This kind of show is rare - when a book has been disassembled for conservation work or rebinding you can see both sides of all the pages at once. More usually, when you visit the Cloisters you see whatever 2 page spread the books happen to be open to at the time. This is a really big deal - and the sweetener, if you needed one, is the display of mourners. From The Art Newspaper story:
Works created under the aegis of two of the greatest art patrons of the period--Jean de France, duc de Berry (1340-1416) and the second Duke of Burgundy, Jean sans Peur (the Fearless, 1371-1419), will fill the Robert Lehman Wing and the Medieval Sculpture Hall. "The Art of Illumination" presents the first, and most likely the last, chance for visitors to see both sides of all 172 folios from the duc de Berry's richly illustrated Book of Hours.This is the only completed manuscript by the Dutch illuminators to survive.
The folios were removed from their bindings as part of a decade-long conservation project and this is the last chance to see all of them simultaneously before they are rebound. "Our biggest challenge was finding a way to present the folios in a way that conveys that they are part of a book rather than just mounted pictures," says curator Timothy Husband.
Conservators devised a new method of display, floating the folios with silk thread strung through the holes made by the original binding. "The Belles Heures is unique...its grandeur and ambition escalates as it goes on.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:35 PM | Comments (0)
I.M. Pei is still alive??
Here's an interesting career-retrospective interview with I.M. Pei at the Financial Times. Pei is one of those people who goes beyond surprising people that he's still alive (he's 92) but that he's still designing major buildings. The picture is the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2008), which I would really like to get to at the end of my Islamic Art & Architecture course.
There's a little bit of everything in the interview - a little biography, a little architectural criticism, and a little Jackie Kennedy (did you realize that JFK would have been 92 this year, too? Pei says the Kennedys chose him for the Kennedy Library and Museum in part because he was born in the same year as the dead president).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:03 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2010
The Genesis of one of the great collections of Islamic arts
I still can't get over how recently two of the great collections of Islamic art were started. The Khalili Collection (based in London) was started in the late 60s or early 70s - and here's the story of the al-Sabah Collection:
In 1975, Sheikh Nasser al-Ahmad al- Sabah, eldest son of the Amir of Kuwait, brought home a 14th- century decorated glass bottle and showed it to his wife, a committed lover of modern abstract art.The beauty of the artifact and its design changed her mind and became the first of more than 30,000 items that now make up one of the world's largest and most valuable collections of Islamic art.
"I realized that everything I loved about modern and contemporary art was in that piece of glass," said Sheika Hussah Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah in Singapore, at the opening of an exhibition of 402 stunning items from the collection illustrating the wealth of India's Mughal empire.
Read more about the exhibition (and a little more about the collection) here.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2010
I think it was the indignity of the three deltas that did it . . .
Funny, when I hear the name "Amon Carter" I think of a great museum of American art, not a drunken frat boy with Greek letters branded on his buttocks. There you go, though - takes all sorts.
via Prof. Soltan.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2010
Albers at the Hirshhorn
There's a big Josef Albers show on at the Hirshhorn at the Smithsonian...and I do wish I didn't have to go to some trouble to visit DC to see it (sister currently stationed elsewhere).
Here's the website for the exhibition.
Here's one of my favorites, which I found on the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation web site. I wonder where it is now?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2010
Oh my - Michigan State to build a Zaha Hadid art center!
Big money from Eli Broad funds a new art museum for Michigan State. Here's the story with a picture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM | Comments (0)
February 4, 2010
Sources and Documents
I had to buy a new copy of J.J. Pollitt's Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents; I have no idea what I've done with mine, the library's is too fragile to xerox out of, and books like this are endlessly useful. I sometimes think of just ordering one of them as the primary textbook along with a history of a period and working through mainly the images (or kinds of images) referred to in the surviving texts. It would be an interesting way to run a course - but ultimately I probably wouldn't like it. We (or I) depend too much on the insights from archaeology, which this kind of textual evidence is not all that helpful at generating.
Here are some other ones I use all the time:
Cyril Mango: The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents
Caecilia Davis-Weyer: Early Medieval Art 300-1150: Sources and Documents
Teresa Frisch: Gothic Art, 1140-c. 1450: Sources and Documents
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:46 AM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2010
Islamic Art in Detroit
The Detroit Institute of Art (one of those museums everyone forgets about - in a formerly great and wealthy city ) is opening a new Islamic Art gallery. Here's a link to the collection - it looks very interesting!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2010
A new year is upon us...
Well, a new semester. We start up tomorrow, and just to greet the returning students - fresh snow! It was so warm here last week that everything melted off except in places where snow plows had pushed it into deep piles - everything was muddy, just like March. Not Geneva at its prettiest. But this morning we start with a nice inch of snow. I don't think we'll get much more than 2 or 3, but what do I know? I'm a Southerner!
I've been running around in circles getting this term started - I've already had enough meetings for my taste, and I have 3 more scheduled this week: Budget Advisory Task Force today and then a Review I committee and Library Committee tomorrow. Then Thursday both my classes have their first meetings. I am moderately ready - I think I could print the syllabi now, but I left them to marinate on my desk overnight and we'll see if I still feel happy about them later today.
Much to my horror I found out when I sat down at the computer that the last time I taught these two, Greek and Islamic, we were still mainly using slides. Neither course is just sitting there with usable lectures on the server. Of course i have the slide sheets from previous iterations, but it's a lot more work that I thought I wasn't going to have to do for daily class prep. The good part is that we've acquired a LOT of new images since 2007 in both areas, particularly of Islamic architecture, so I would have been integrating those anyway.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:16 AM | Comments (1)
January 9, 2010
Nickel goes for $3,737,500 at auction
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM | Comments (1)
January 8, 2010
Nazi Loot for Christmas
The first book I finished in the new year was The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. Quite a good survey of the northern European campaign to save and return Europe's treasures.
The author did a good job of weaving Nazi documents into the story - and the 'dramatizations' were all worthwhile. I recognized the names of most of the Monument Men - they were mainly mid-century famous art historians. The most important to me was James Rorimer, a medievalist who ended up as director of the Met.
The most interesting person, though, was Rose Valland, a staffer at the Jeu de Paumes who tracked Nazi looting thoroughly enough to steer Rorimer to the right salt mines in Germany to find things looted from Jewish collections.
Worthwhile.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:46 PM | Comments (0)
January 4, 2010
Busy Art Thefts weekend in the South of France.
Police said there was no evidence linking this case to the theft of a drawing by Degas, worth almost $1.15 million, from the Cantini Museum in Marseille last week.
In real life, maybe. In a movie? Pffft!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2010
A Museum of Modern Art - in Charlotte. In 2009.
Someday the use of capital-M Modern to describe 1900-1980 (or so) will end, but not yet.
A new museum dedicated to showing Modern art opened the other day in Charlotte, NC - the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (their own site). Here's a blog story about the collection. This family collection was held in Switzerland until now.
The building is by Mario Botta and looks interesting. The big Niki de St. Phalle sculpture outside is the most - um - grounded firebird I've seen. I found a photo on flickr - the poster there suggested that some locals call it the Disco Chicken.
This will certainly be worth a visit if you're in Charlotte; we'll hear, eventually, if it's worth a side trip.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:49 AM | Comments (0)
January 1, 2010
A little art theft to start the year right
Someone walked out of the Musée Cantini in Marseille with a smallish Degas (10x13"). Picture here.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:28 AM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2009
It's all in the horns....
Ok - I know there are no moving pictures, but sit back and listen. Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester and Tainted Love, a song of my youth - Weimar Style. Weimarstil?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:20 PM | Comments (4)
October 29, 2009
Wait a second - hasn't MoMA already BUILT a condo tower?
Well, yes, but they've gotten another one approved.
And look at the picture for the proposal.
They get a 200 x 200 exhibition space out of this - that's what 40,000 square feet means. That's one floor? A floor and a half? 17.5% of the space is dedicated to the core function of art. 40,000 sq ft out of 700,000. I guess that hits some benchmark.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:50 AM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2009
Wonder if the National Portrait Gallery will have to remove the Fairey Obama poster?
Now that he's an admitted image-thief, I wonder if the National Portrait Gallery will have to do something with the Obama Hope poster. You know, the one the extremely well-connected lobbyists gave them?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:01 PM | Comments (1)
October 14, 2009
Ah - midterms.
I am giving a midterm.
Yes, even as I type my European Studies 101 (Antiquity to the Renaissance) students are writing busily for 55 minutes.
I have the laptop with me and am watching them think.
This is a typical identify-the-quotation-and-comment test. What makes it mine, different from when folks from other departments teach it, is that there are 3 or 4 images on the test to consider either in their cultural context or in comparison to a specific text. For instance, we do a day (a day and a half, this year) on the Parthenon to go along with Pericles and the Melian Dialogue. It's useful to see what those Athenians spent the treasure of the Delian League building - and to figure out how much MARBLE it would have taken.
Likewise, when we look at the Code of Hammurabi we look at the Stele of Hammurabi. Right up there at the top is Hammurabi receiving his authority (though not written tablets of the law) from Marduk. That's a useful image to discuss.
Wish them luck!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)
October 4, 2009
Beautiful Obamification
Was the Iconic Shepherd Fairey Obama Hope Image Taken by Freelance Photographer Mannie Garcia?
Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 PM | Comments (0)
Plato and crankiness
Tomorrow we start The Symposium in Euro Studies 101. Talk about mood swings!
I appreciate Plato much more now that I am an adult. Plato was a great artist. However, I think he's a deeply tricky one - and probably even not particularly honest. I don't believe in his Socrates at all - just one quick read through Xenophon makes you realize that in a world of opposing evidence we can't just say that Plato is right - unless, of course, we are professors of philosophy who think that full-time philosophers are inherently more reliable than soldiers.
So tomorrow I'm starting off with about 15 or 25 minutes of pictures of symposia, masks of Dionysus, and Greek homosexuality. I'm an art historian, after all - and these folks get to deal with visual evidence along with translated texts.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 PM | Comments (2)
September 30, 2009
People who ask other people to sign petitions...
Should really think about what they're doing. Woody Allen may feel strongly about Roman Polanski's arrest - but you shouldn't have asked the man who took naked pictures of his stepdaughter to sign a petition on behalf of the man who plead guilty to drugging and raping a 13 year old. Credibility issues and all.
I love this line from the petition:
"The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance ... opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects," said the signatories...
What do they think Switzerland is, Disneyworld? Switzerland is neutral in WAR, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of laws and arrest people - even some who are wanted in other countries.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:58 AM
September 29, 2009
Yaz - Only You
I know, I know - I'll get over the 80s binge eventually - but hey. I'm in reunion mode.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:56 PM
September 25, 2009
A beautiful Rube Goldberg Machine
I ran across this watching a video of the prototype u3x 02.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (2)
September 24, 2009
Huuuuuuuge Anglo Saxon hoard found
And appropriately over the top statements are made by experts:
The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire.Experts said the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date back to the 7th Century, was unparalleled in size.
. . .
The collection contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.
Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.
"(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells."
Yow. That's a lot to live up to. Still - go read and see. There's even video!
Here's the website for the hoard.
Here's the Flickr stream!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2009
Remember all those lists of how George W. Bush was bringing Fascism to America?
I do - some of my colleagues had them posted outside their office doors.
Well, having read a fair amount, though in an amateur way, about historical Fascism, I figure that government interference in the arts has to be pretty high on the list of characteristics - certainly for Mussolini and Hitler.
So how you liking the Obama NEA, folks?
Or try here, if you find right wing bloggers upsetting when they tell you what's going on.
Further: Yosi Sergant, the NEA Communications Director, resigns. Smoke, fire, new guidelines being drafted, yeah.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:36 PM | Comments (1)
September 1, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XI
Canto XI
Is it worth talking about Dante as a fair judge?
Dante is even-handed only in the sense that he damns a certain number of Guelphs - otherwise he's not to be trusted. I was thinking about this because I had a talk this weekend with a friend of a scene in Purgatory where someone Dante thinks was pretty bad in life scraped in because of a moment-of-death conversion (I can't find it now - it'll wait). Some of the folks in Hell don't seem to have been given a chance for repentance, even when they had the leisure for it - like Pope Celestine in Canto III - who, after all, lived for 10 months in imprisonment after making what Dante calls "il gran rifiuto." Think he might have repented?
Similarly, Dante sometimes works with poor historical information, like here in Canto XI, when he damns Pope Anastasius as a Monophysite (one of the last of the Christological heresies of early Christianity). But then Dante was no historian - there's a reason most of his characters are, more or less, current events. By the way, I'm not at all offended by the idea of a pope in hell (I like John Chrysostom's quip, that hell is paved with priest's skulls), but given the rules Dante sets up it seems unlikely - they have too many chances for sacramental confession. I have no particular doubt that Teddy Kennedy made a good end, for instance. He had a lot to confess, but so do I.
Dante's got a job, though - he has to populate the rings of Hell.
Oh - a quick aside - I wonder why the Modern Library and Anthony Esolen titled the three books Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He may well have explained that in some front matter I missed, but it seems a little odd to stick to the Italian in one but not the other two. Maybe a pure marketing decision - name recognition for the first may really be that high?
OK - back to the rings of Hell. Now is a time to draw on the board again - Hell has order inside which chaos is confined. Look at the bottom right (Christ's left) of the mosaic from the west wall of the cathedral at Torcello (one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon). Those boxes each contain a variety of the damned - I'd click to enlarge. Similarly, Virgil offers in Canto XI a quick explanation of the layout of the rings of Hell.
All the remaining sins have some element of force or fraud - we're past the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and into something more offensive to God. The violent are neatly divided into those who have committed violence against their neighbors, against themselves, or against God. The lowest rings, though, are crimes of fraud. Or,
Since fraud's a sin peculiar to mankind
God hates it more; and so the fraudulent
sink farther down, assailed by greater pain.
(11.25-27)
The Torcello mosaic and Dante go a long way to reminding us that the Middle Ages exulted in order. Whether they achieved it or not is another question - but any explanation of the history of ideas or the history of culture that presents some kind of change from disorder and darkness to balance and brightness because of some self-styled Renaissance is up against it - what can be more neurotically balanced than Aquinas? What vision of the Cosmos is more orderly than Ptolemy's as elaborated by Muslims and medieval Christians? The philosophical movement that goes along with imitation natural landscapes is the Enlightenment, not the Scholastics - who preferred their horti to be conclusi.
Oh well - professors are always fighting yesterday's battles. In fact, most of my students don't seem to have a lot of cultural baggage about the Middle Ages. They haven't really ingested any periodization at all. I should probably shut up and move on.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2009
Was the model who undressed in the Met naked, or nude?
Hyman asked, "Why is this wrong? There were thousands of people in the Met today looking at nudes as art, but as soon as there is a real nude, it's a big problem."Neill had the same question, which she posed to the security guard who detained her.
"She told me there were naked statues everywhere," the guard said. "I said, 'Those statues are 400 years old. You're from the 21st century.'
I vote, with Robert Graves, for nude. This is sly. It's rhetorical.
The Naked and the Nude
Robert Graves
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!
Sorry - Canto X is taking me longer than usual - but take the Gorgons pursuing the nude as a reminder of IX.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:15 AM
August 27, 2009
Free-Roaming Pigs of Medieval France
Feminina Boots offers her niece Fanta weekly updates about her book club experiences.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM | Comments (3)
August 24, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VI
Canto VI
The damned of the third circle are the gluttons, wallowing in a mire and beaten by a hard winter rain:
...de la piova
etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve;
regola e qualità mai no l'è nova. 6.7-9
...where the rain falls
eernally, accursed, ponderous, cold --
changeless in rhythm, changeless in quality.
Even with little or no Italian you ought to be able to read that out loud and hear the sound effect Dante wants. Brrr.
Canto VI also brings us our first Florentine (Paolo and Francesca were from the Adriatic coast - Ravenna and Rimini), and provides us with a good example of Dante's topicality. The soul identifies himself only by his nickname, Hog, and we don't know any more about him. Dante asks him what will happen in Florence in the next few years (there's no speculation in this canto on how the damned know the future - we'll get that later) and the Hog predicts.
Esolen valiantly notes:
Naturally, few readers now will care deeply about the fortunes of Blacks or Whites, Guelphs or Ghibellines. We should remember, however, that Dante's visition -- the incarnational vision of Christianity -- was never, and could never be, a vision that ignored the goodness of this very world that Christ entered to save. Florence is part of that world; then even Florence plays a part in the divine plan.
I think that sounds like a man bored by years of having to explain the Blacks and Whites, Guelphs and Ghibellines (Dante was a White Guelph, by the way, which was why he was exiled in 1302). Esolen is right, but Florence in 1300 still isn't very interesting.
I think we can use the tedious topical references to remind ourselves what a great poem this is - the Comedia overcomes its topicality. Otherwise we would have stopped reading it long ago.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM | Comments (1)
August 21, 2009
Art news of the odd
Drowning at the museum. Talk about risky art!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IV
Canto IV
Canto III ends with Dante falling into unconsciousness, and IV begins with a boom that shakes him awake. Not every pair of Cantos carries action across the break so smoothly (or jarringly, as in this case), but the transitions are always worth checking. Dante was a thorough craftsman. There is certainly lots of debate about the making of the poem - he started it in exile, probably in 1304, he seems to have published Inferno in 1314. That gives a lot of time for polishing.
I think the urge to see Dante as a poet who begins uncertainly is an example of the (Romantic?) failure to separate maker from creation - to assume that Dante (in this example) is speaking authentically as Dante, that he is afraid, that he does not know where he is, that he is learning from Virgil as he goes along. I'm calling the Pilgrim "Dante" out of laziness and convention more than anything. I don't believe this is Dante Alighieri speaking to us from the heart - this is a finely constructed object of art. It certainly has stress fractures and may even have some bad lines (I'm not enough of a judge of the Italian to say - though this effort will surely help that), but the Commedia makes much more sense as a unity. If there's ever a poem that repays formalist analysis it's this one.
In Canto IV we enter Limbo - and Dante asks Virgil one of those hard questions - did no one leave here before the Resurrection? What about those unbaptized infants?Is this fair??
Well, if 'fair' means playing by the rules, this is fair. It's also hard lines on the virtuous pagans. Dante suggests, though he lists only big name Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, that virtuous Jews from before the Incarnation were saved at the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended. What happens to later Jews we will consider later.
Dante is more interested at this point in showing us that there is a hierarchy in Limbo, a hierarchy not of happiness or contentment but honor. There is honor in limbo for the greatest souls.
I've always thought that the appearance of the first epic list of names here is hardly an accident. Dante is not only giving us a long list of virtuous unbelievers - among whom he includes 2 or 3 Muslims - because he's in a castle full of them but also because, in Virgil's company, he has just met Homer, Ovid, and Lucan. I think because he is accepted into their circle as a poet, he demonstrates his mastery of the genre. If we don't believe that we have to take refuge in believing the narrative and think that a person, Dante, is walking all around the only castle in Hell with decent lighting looking at nametags.
The Canto ends with the pair leaving this Castle with clear light, headed into darkness. Dante does it with a LOT of words ending in -a.
La sesta compagnia in due si scema:
per altra via mi mena il savio duca
fuor de la queta, ne l'aura che trema.
E vegno in parte ove non è che luca.
Esolen gives us:
The company of six is cut by two,
and my wise guide leads me another way,
out of the quiet, into the trembling air --
Into a place where nothing ever shines
"Trembling air" sounds lovely, but when we turn the page we will find out what makes it tremble.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto II
Canto II
Dante is one self-absorbed poet who has to learn to be a little less so. Canto II - and the whole of The Inferno - is about* fear, one of Dante's besetting faults, and getting past fear. Dante starts the Canto well, invoking the Muses, genius, and memory - and I'm wondering to what extent ingegno has connotations of "skill" as well as "genius" or "ingenuity" here. He addresses Virgil at great length about previous trips to Hell and Heaven, but by the end of his address he is afraid he is not up to it. "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Saint Paul!" Dante sums up his own problem in 6 lines:
And as a man who unwills what he wills,
changing his plan for every little thought,
till he withdraws from any kind of start,
So did I turn my mind on that dark verge,
for thinking ate away the enterprise
so prompt in the beginning to set forth. (2.37-42)
Ah - cowardice. Virgil names the vice and explains how he himself came here, his call by Beatrice. Virgil himself had wondered that Beatrice came to him from Heaven with no fear or worry; Beatrice gave him the answer, which he offers as one reason for Dante not to fear:
The only things that justly cause us fear
are those that have the power to do us harm; (2.88-89)
That's going to come up again.
More important though is this - Virgil puts it for Dante in the terms of courtly love and the Court of Heaven - why are you afraid:
Seeing that three such ladies blessed in Heave
care for your healing from their court above,
and what I tell you holds forth so much good? (2.124-126)
Esolen says about another moment in the Canto "He is saved not because he loves but because he is loved" (413).
Dante's response is a lovely piece of courtly contrast - his courage is like little flowers, fioretti and virtude -
As little flowers shut small and bowed beneath
the frost of night, when the sun brightens them,
rise open-petaled on their stems upright,
So did my weary courage surge again (2.127-130)
Talk about plenty to discuss - and that's even without delving into the placement of the invocation of the Muses (yes, we started in medias res as well as nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) or one of my own little hobbyhorses, Dante's avoidance of names. In Canto II we get a good example of his refusal in the Inferno to name the Virgin Mary, and the first time Aeneas is called something other than the father of Silvius is in a negation - "I'm not Aeneas!" Typical - and worth talking about.
*disclaimer - when I say something "Is about" or "is all about" I am engaging in the exaggeration of the spoken voice or the written blog post - everything in the Middle Ages is about lots of things. Univocality may be a sign that something is not medieval.
Further: It occurred to me when rereading - while I was getting the HTML to format the tercet indentations correctly - that I hadn't said that virtude has its root in Latin vir, "man." Then I realized that this is not a commentary on the Commedia but only a first pass at teaching notes. When I do this sort of thing for books I'm preparing to teach I just circle word parts that are going to go up on the blackboard - I know what vir means, what virtù means in Renaissance Italian, and I'm going to go on about it in class.
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto I
Dante Blogging
My dear friend and colleague Laurence Erussard and I are planning to teach Dante together as one of our Medieval Art and Literature courses. She was up for next fall - Fall 2010 - but I insisted that starting Dante in August and ending in December was wrongheaded, especially in the Frozen North. So we will teach Dante in Spring '11 - starting in Hell in January and ending in Paradise in May - which is closer to right. June would be better.
To prepare for this, since I've only ever taught Dante in a casual, half-credit style, I decided to read my way through again. My resolution is to blog a Canto a day. The new(ish) Anthony Esolen translation comes highly recommended by Prof. Bob Benson at Sewanee, who has taught Dante every year for a long time. I bought a set. I got through 3 canti before I realized that I ought to be blogging my progress. Here we go.
Canto I
Dante's hard for us. Long poetry is hard for everyone. The Medieval World View makes life more difficult.
We're going to have to do a good job setting the students up in how to read allegory - not to slave at it, but to let themselves dance with the polysemy. Is the Wolf Greed? Malice? The World? A wolf? Why not all four? You might think, in this age of irony, that ambiguity would be something students get instinctively; my experience is that my students want certainty -- they'd like an answer. Unsettling that desire will be one of Dante's contributions to their education.
The first astronomical moment shows up in line 17. raggi del pianeta/che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle, which Esolen translates: "the rays of that wandering light of Heaven/that leads all men aright on every road." That's handy - we get to start with the idea the Sun is a Planet in the Ptolemaic Cosmos, and that planets are wanderers. What a good start!
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:48 AM | Comments (2)
August 11, 2009
Sounds like this offender needs some Art HISTORY Therapy`
Frustrated Russian throws cup at Mona Lisa
A Russian woman frustrated at failing to obtain French nationality hurled a ceramic cup at the Mona Lisa but did not damage Leonardo da Vinci's famed portrait, a spokesman for the Louvre Museum said on Tuesday.
If she'd done her reading, she'd know that the subject and the artist were both Italians. Oh, well.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)
August 4, 2009
The Getty gets a loan from Italy
All is forgiven. Sort of.
The first big loan - the Chimaera of Arezzo. Go here to see a photo and read a review of the show. The author ignores the idea that this comes out of many years of lawsuits - and the arrest of Marion True, the Getty's former curator for antiquities.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:32 AM
August 1, 2009
Countering Becket
The Castle at Dover has undergone an extensive restoration, trying to recapture its appearance under Henry II. A British professor suggested that Henry spent piles of money fancying up Dover Castle as a way to counter the Becket cult - and to welcome foreign monarchs and aristocrats to England. The argument makes sense, though I'm not sure there's any real evidence.
What I really like is that though I found the story I'm linking to at one of my favorite archaeology aggregator sites, that site sent me to the Daily Telegraph version of the story. The Telegraph's little navigation tool at the top of the story amused me:
HOME > NEWS > NEWS TOPICS > THE ROYAL FAMILYNot HISTORY or ARCHAEOLOGY, but THE ROYAL FAMILY. I guess! Go look at the story - there are seven pictures - and it looks like the restoration is interesting. Fun to visit!
Further: More pictures - these at the BBC site.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:41 AM | Comments (1)
July 29, 2009
The Macclesfield Alphabet Book will stay in England
The British Library raised money from the public and from arts granting agencies to pay £600,000 for the Macclesfield Alphabet Book. The article speculates that the book might have been a demonstration piece for customers on the part of an illuminators' workshop around 1500. Lots of the characters are made of up beasts and people.
Here's a direct link to the slide show - 10 pages of the manuscript!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM
July 28, 2009
Warning to film festivals - get more sophisticated web sites!
And lawyers.
Chinese hacker(s?) attack an Australian film festival because of a Uyghur film.
Oh - by the way - I was sure that I have been reading Uighur rather than Uyghur. Some prescriptivist at Wikipedia assures us that there is such a thing as an only correct spelling:
The English transcription of the Uyghur ethnonym: [ʔʊɪˈʁʊː] is Uyghur. Typically, Uyghur is pronounced as /ˈwiː.ɡər/ by English speakers; however, /ujˈɡur/ is closer to native pronunciation. Moreoever, several alternate spellings appear in literature: Uighur, Uygur and Uigur, but the only correct spelling is Uyghur.
The whole point of transliterated words is that there are not correct spellings, only conventional ones, and conventions change. I'm certain that the convention at National Geographic was Uighur as of the last time I read it in the print edition. I'm amused to find by searching that the prescriptivist with the "only correct spelling" has failed as of 7:14 AM EDT this morning to clean up the entire Wikipedia article on Uyghur people. Sometimes Uighur slips in, still.
Further: Even the CNN article linked above has both versions - Uy in the story and Ui in the caption!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:06 AM
July 19, 2009
Clean walls
I'm suffering here - suffering from a luxury uncommon for those who haven't recently moved. I have clean walls into which I must drive nails.
The ceiling in my back bedroom / study collapsed disastrously two years ago - only missing my visiting friend Brad Smith by about half an hour. Amusingly enough, he's headed back up this way this summer - and the ceiling has finally been fixed. Yes, I stayed in the apartment with a messed up ceiling - you'd have to understand how great the building is and how (relatively) little I've used the study in the last two years. Spending a spring in Rome with a term abroad group and a second spring semester away for my own purposes helped a lot.
But now the ceiling is fixed and the walls are lovely.
So - I'm putting the bookcases, the guest bed, and the pub-table-used-as-a-desk back where they were. Now I have to hang some things I've been procrastinating about for some time. I've decided the room will become my hall of maps. I have a lot of them and haven't had any up on the walls since my first Geneva apartment at 10 Park Place.
So now I'm agonizing about where to bang a nail. Alas.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:50 PM | Comments (1)
July 12, 2009
The Golden Virgin of Essen
This statue of the Virgin and Child was made around 980 for Abbess Matilda, granddaughter of Emperor Otto I. I like it for two or three reasons. First, it's all golden and great. Second, she's got great enamel goggle eyes - and they're weirder in person than in photographs. Third, she undercuts a particularly tedious assertion of those kinds of people who like to see the invention of the reflective individual in the 12th or 13th Century.*
They tend to say things like "all Virgin and Child sculptures from the 11th Century are hieratic and stiff and frontal and formal and not very nice. Then in the delightful Gothic era we begin to see mothers who interact vividly with the child Jesus." I know, I'm not being fair, but one does get tired of the condescension, whether from Lady de Burgh** or other medievalists.
Well hell. Look at this one. So she's not making eye contact with Him - but the whole pose is as dynamic as a Schoene Jungfrau of the 15th Century. This artist had seen something in touch with the Classical - something Byzantine, something real, something naturalistic. The monastery at Essen undoubtedly had stuff that had percolated west from the 9th Century capital of the world - Constantinople. That marriage for Otto II with the Theophanu girl, whoever she really was, came with gear.*** In fact, one of the immediate successors of the abbess who commissioned this statue was even named after Theophanu.
What a nexus object! I was very happy to visit Her.
*You know, like this book.
**Gratuitous Jane Austen reference.
***Really. We're still debating who Theophanu was - niece of the Emperor?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:51 PM | Comments (1)
July 3, 2009
I'm blond, I like Helvetica.
An advertisement for a student art show...one that I think I'd enjoy.
For Elaine and Bruce.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2009
The unintended consequences of giving art back to those from whom the Nazis stole it.
In 2006 the relatives of Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker used the proceeds from the sales both privately and at auction of restituted art to pay off the millions of dollars worth of legal fees and expenses that had accumulated over the nine years it took to finalize their agreement with the Dutch government. As of April 2008, they had already sold two-thirds of the 200 Old Master paintings they reclaimed. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the same number of paintings that hung in museums around the Netherlands prior to their restitution are still hanging in museums or public spaces today.The families recovering the art are turning around and selling it. Of course, they are entirely within their rights. After all, just because these paintings have been hanging in public collections for 60 years or so doesn't been they belong to the public.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:15 PM | Comments (2)
June 8, 2009
Art theft Squad and Murder!
Combining two of my interests, art theft and Law and Order, the Los Angeles police arrest one of their own art theft specialists for murder! I expect the L&O version ripped from this headline shortly.
Even better:
Last week, undercover officers surreptitiously trailed Lazarus as she did errands one day, waiting until she discarded a coffee cup, straw or something else with her saliva on it, Beck said.
And it was a match!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM
June 4, 2009
The feigned innocence of legal arguments
Ah, the disingenuity of lawyers!
Read the excerpts from the argument here against Yale.
I'm only going to cut and paste a funny:
"Yale's continued and wrongful detention of the unlawfully confiscated 'The Night Cafe' is prohibited by customary and international treaty law," Konowaloff's attorneys wrote in the filings. (my emphasis)
You can detain a painting?
On a more serious note - of COURSE Mr. Clark knew the painting he bought came from the Commissars! Just like the Forbes family knows why all those Faberge products hit the market. It wasn't a policy of willful ignorance, as the lawyers argue - it was the way the art trade worked. Right of conquest and all - the Soviets won. It wasn't fair and square, but it was clear cut.
And of course the purported descendant wants the Night Cafe back. But he shouldn't claim much moral high ground. I'm with Yale on this one.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2009
Porphyry Column of Constantine
My life story - I walk up to famous, tall thing only to find it scaffolded (see Freiburg Münsterturm).
This elaborate scaffolding surrounds Constantine's Porphyry Column, now known as the Burnt Column - Çemberlitas in Turkish (and I can't get the little thingy to come out on the final s, sorry). From a distance I could see the porphyry surface, at least.
The Romans carefully placed it on the main street, running along a ridge top, from forum to forum. The elevation - along with it's own enormous height something like 110 feet - means that it is visible from the Sea of Marmora and the Golden Horn. Constantine topped it with an enormous statue of himself as the Sun. That's Constantine all over.
I walked around it several times, then finally spotted the inconspicuous entrance to the Çemberlitas Hamam. Gosh that was pleasant, but it was all for knowledge - Sinan designed the building! Click here and look at the images of the dome.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:40 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2009
Blue Mosque - muqarnas capital
You know, the trip might have been worth it for nothing more than getting a quick immersion in muqarnas, the omnipresent honeycomb decorative technique in Islamic architecture after the year 1000 or 1100; you might compare it with acanthus motifs in Greek architecture and forms derived from that. I have seen lots of pictures, and examples in American museums, but the only other predominantly Muslim country I have ever visited is Malaysia.
People (both officials and folks you meet) are always asking "are you here for business or pleasure?" My short answer is "pleasure," since looking is a pleasure for me. But really I'm always on duty.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2009
Do I look happy?
I hope so!
I'm in Hagia Sophia!
You may know how I talk about the Pantheon. I'm going to have to go back into Hagia Sophia again and think.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:54 PM | Comments (5)
April 24, 2009
The weirdest building in Europe?
The Mole Antonelliana, my entry for the weirdest building in Europe. Keep looking up and it keeps getting odder.
Inside is the National Museum of Film, which was splendid and strange, too. The enormous central hall is filled with lounging sofas. Visitors lie back and watch one of two screens (yes, the image of the anaesthetized consumer who can't choose is intentional) running almost continuously. This month there's a Rudolph Valentino show up, so one screen was continuous excerpts from his movies and one was from related movies showing his influence or documentaries from his period. Exceptionally well done.
In side chambers around the main level are permanent exhibitions devoted to emotions stirred by film and tv, like horror, suspense, love, familial fondness - in other words, a way to explore genres.
Then a giant ramp climbs the interior - kind of like the Guggenheim. That's where a massive exhibition of Valentino stuff was. Then in galleries opening off the ramp (again, like the Guggenheim), were incredible exhibitions of the technical aspects of film making and a movie poster collection.
The entire place was spectacular and a spectacle. There is a viewing platform which one (not me) reaches with a glass elevator running through the center of the great space. Periodically, always when an elevator is ascending or descending, all the films stop, all the shades on all the windows around the central Aula rise, the room slowly floods with light and then sinks back into darkness. The soundtrack, which has been a low babel of all the other sound tracks playing, comes together from every speaker in the building with the theme from Bladerunner when the elevator is climbing the side of the Tyrell Corporation. It took me a second or two to remember what it was.
Now I like movies, but I am far from being a film buff or serious or anything - and it took me an hour and a half. Like many public buildings the exit wound back into the same hall as the entry. As one starts down the steps one looks up to a shelf-like area invisible to those entering (well, unless one stops and turn 180 degrees and look, but who does that while walking INTO a museum?). There grinning at us is a golden calf.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2009
The economy and art in Las Vegas
Last year saw the closure of a Guggenheim outpost in the Venetian Hotel-Casino and the decision in 2007 by Steve Wynn to convert a gallery at his Wynn Las Vegas resort into a Rolex shop.
And not just any Rolex shop, a very successful one. Let's not forget that Las Vegas resorts are businesses, after all. Read the article.
Wynn, who for a time showed his private collection of Monets and Picassos in a gallery at his resort, boasted last year that the Rolex shop he replaced it with grossed $16 million in sales the first year.The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian is now a restaurant.
The article then cites as a ray of hope:
Also, the 10-year-old Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art has drawn 7,000 paying visitors in the first two months of its latest show featuring works by Lichtenstein and Warhol; and First Friday, a festival in which several downtown small galleries and antique shops stay open late, draws thousands each month.
Wait - 7,000 over two months is a few more than 100 people a day. Pretty slow. I'm afraid that people go to Las Vegas for something other than beauty.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:38 AM | Comments (1)
A show I haven't seen
I'm sorry that the big Vespasian show is mounted in the Colosseum. Since I got here after spring started the lines for the Colosseum have been unbearable - and as far as I can tell there's no separate entrance for the exhibition.
The show looks splendid, and is curated by Filippo Coarelli, a really important Roman archaeologists. But I hate standing in line, sometimes so much that I'll skip a show.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:15 AM | Comments (1)
April 18, 2009
An antidote for the Burden of History
Sometimes walking around Rome can get to be a little much. I find that modern music helps - in 2003 I listened to a lot of Verve: Remixed as an antidote. This year I haven't been in much of a music mood - and my walk has been really short - the joy of living close to what one needs to look at.
Thursday, though, I kind of snapped. I woke up, walked to Termini, and checked departure times for Latina and Orvieto. An InterCity train stopping in Latina left 30 minutes sooner than anything to Orvieto (and I think that was a Regionale and hence criminally slow when you're taking a mental health day and paying less than €10) so there I went!
I had driven past (or maybe even through?) Latina a couple of times when my sister and family lived in Gaeta - the via Appia runs past - but I had never been there.
Latina was founded in 1932 by Mussolini as Littoria, capital of the newly-drained Pontine Marshes. The Agro Pontino is an enormous area of Central Italy that was swampy and malarial since time out of mind. So Latina is thoroughly planned. Click here for the Italian Wikipedia article - look for the plans. Latina is one of the great examples of Rationalist (i.e., dirigiste Moderne, i.e., Fascist) architecture. There's a street named after Corbusier for a reason.
Once he drained the Pontine Marshes, Mussolini moved a bunch of peasants from Friuli and the Veneto (North east italy) to the new agricultural territory. They were not particularly grateful, from what I've read. But Mussolini was dead set on Italy becoming self-sufficient agriculturally - hence the Wheat-fountain.
I wandered around and took lots of photos - here are some of them on Flickr.
The city is a little much in its type, but it looks pretty liveble. It has the second largest population in the region of Lazio (after Rome), which may or may not tell us anything. It was certainly an antidote to the burden of the past - I came back feeling much better, ready to dive back into the 9th century.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:36 PM | Comments (2)
April 16, 2009
Giotto and the 14th Century
Of course the title in the show is one of those cross cultural problems - "Giotto e il Trecento." That's 1300s, not 13th Century. Always confuses beginning art historians. Big show - and at a big venue, the Vittoriano. All in all I didn't learn as much as I did from the Futurism show, but the exhibition itself was much better done - lots of explanatory text, clearer juxtapositions by hanging. But really, Giotto was better at fresco than at panel painting, and they only had a couple of detached Giotto frescoes.
Amazing, though - they had a panel painting out of the Arena Chapel, the Enthroned God the Father, which is painted on a shutter. That was splendid! Some of the loans were pretty amazing!
Again, I'm having trouble finding a link to the show itself.
I was amused at the scientific committee for the exhibition. Every single professor, including the American (Herbert Kessler at Johns Hopkins) is a medievalist. Though there were lots of claims of novelty in the wall text, the show made it very clear how Giotto is transitional from Gothic, not so much revolutionary.
Oh - and Giotto's hands are pretty unconvincing up close. His martyr saints hold palms convincingly, evangelists hold books pretty well, but St. Peter always looks like he's about to drop the keys. This problem is more conspicuous when you move into room fulls of paintings by followers, many of whom paint convincing hands. So - all volumetric bodies, little emphasis on hands.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:10 PM | Comments (1)
April 11, 2009
Fools for Christ
Yesterday I was making my usual round of church stops. The added benefit was getting to see a lot of Altars of Repose. I didn't photograph any of those (you know, I really should get over being so nice!), but when I got close to home around noon I went by Sta. Maria ai Monti, where I had been to mass on Sunday.
The great reason to visit there is the tomb of St. Benedict Joseph Labre, an odd sort of saint. He failed to enter two or three monastic orders - all of whom seem to have detected some incipient craziness. He wandered as a pilgrim from place to place, eventually more or less settling in Rome. He lived off and on in the ruins of the Colosseum (much more ruinous then!), and eventually died in the house of some charitable person in the parish who took him in.
Miraculous healings followed at once - and he may have done a few in his lifetime. He's the kind of saint who makes the hierarchical church very nervous - but he was canonized anyway, and here he is.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2009
The Future was once so exciting . . .
I went to the big Futurismo: avanguardia avanguardie ("Futurism: Avantgarde, Avantgardes") at the Scuderie del Quirinale - the old stables for the Quirinal Palace - yesterday.
I thought this was another example of a bad exhibit with great stuff. The theme wasn't particularly clear - the subtitle helped, but there was no wall text beyond identification for each work. You had to read the little booklet, and it wasn't very helpful. The STUFF was great - the first floor was all Futurists. My favorite was definitely Guido Severini's Memories of a Voyage. Because it's from a private collection (and perhaps because I didn't write down the Italian title!) I can't find it online. There were very few of the usual paintings, though there were great examples by all the usual suspects.
The second floor had "the Avantgardes." The Cubists, the Vorticists (who were an interesting change - I hadn't seen any of these paintings before), and a bunch of Russians that didn't fit so well.
The show closed with a sudden slamming door. There was one room of Futurist war paintings, a series of Balla patriotic horrors. One was called Forms Shout 'Viva l'Italia!', a sad demonstration of what happens when abstraction becomes political. In the center of the room, with no explanation, was Boccioni's Development of a Bottle in Space from 1912. Now it made perfect sense as a formalist comparison to the Ballas on the walls - but this was supposedly a thematic show and this was a room supposedly about how the war ends Futurism (I guess).
The lighting on the first level deserves a paragraph of its own. The first level is a huge open hall. They had built an insert to hang the show. It was a perfect color - a soft blue-grey. Then they lit it. In my notes on the spot I wrote "CRAZY drama lighting!" When I told a colleague that last night she laughed and agreed. The lighting designer created strips of bright light that sometimes did and sometimes didn't overlap paintings. When they did overlap glassed paintings the glare was way beyond annoying and up into the "makes it impossible to see." You've never seen so many people dancing around to find the right place to get past the glare. If you follow the web link above and look for the link for photos you can even see the effect. Crazy. Dramatic. Not good.
All in all I'd recommend people see it (it's up until late May). The art is WELL worth €10.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)
April 9, 2009
All the inscriptions of the Alhambra - I want a copy!
Talk about a corpus - all the inscriptions of the Alhambra transcribed and translated (into Spanish, but hey!), on DVD:
Researchers have produced an interactive DVD that decodes, dates and identifies 3,116 of some 10,000 inscriptions carved on the building that symbolises centuries of Muslim rule in Spain and is today the country's top tourist landmark."There's perhaps nowhere else in the world where gazing upon walls, columns and fountains is an exercise so similar to turning the pages of a book of poems," says Juan Castilla, from the School of Arabic Studies at Spain's Higher Scientific Research Council, whose team produced this still-incomplete guide.
Arabic artisans, supervised by poets employed in the 14th-century court of King Yusuf I, drew up the decorative plans and planned the spaces where verses - original, or copied - were to be engraved.
So, what do these words say? "There aren't as many as we thought," Dr Castilla confessed. Inscriptions of poetry and verses from the Koran that have inspired generations represent only a minimum percentage of the texts that adorn the Alhambra's walls, despite the mistaken belief that they are smothered in writings of this kind, he said, presenting his study in Madrid.
Instead the motto of the Nazrid dynasty - "There is no victor but Allah" - is repeated hundreds of times on walls, arches and columns. Isolated words like "happiness" or "blessing" recur, seen as divine expressions protecting the monarch or governor honoured in each palace or courtyard. Aphorisms abound: "Rejoice in good fortune, because Allah helps you," and "Be sparse in words and you will go in peace."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
April 8, 2009
Looking at layers
Ninth Century mosaic, with motifs lifted from 5th and 4th century examples. Set in a plan lifted from a 4th century basilica. 18th century baldachino, reusing some porphyry columns from the 16th century baldachino - and goodness only knows where they came from before that. Under the baldachino? A crypt full of relics! See why I love Santa Prassede?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:15 AM
April 2, 2009
Wandering
I'm having one of those weeks that ought to be annoying - talking to an apartment finding service constantly about my next move (don't ask! I'll blog eventually), trying to track down a friend or two who I'd already communicated with, notifying folks I hadn't communicated with, knocking on some (literal and figurative) doors about a project, getting a damn haircut - and nothing has been going very well.
But you know, I'm in Rome and the sun is shining. Sono abbastanza contento.
I went with my colleague Bonnie, 2 of her students (who happen to be former advisees of mine), and 2 of her friends from Duqesne and saw Guido Reni's Aurora yesterday. That's an example of an only-on-the-first-of-the-month-if-that-doesn't-fall-on-Sunday Rome experiences, and one well'worth tracking down. GOSH what colors.
Today has been more frustration, but I got a haircut, which is a start.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:46 PM | Comments (1)
April 1, 2009
Rather DIE than finish the semester?
I know the feeling, though I'm not suffering from it this year.
If it's any consolation, look at this tomb in Bologna from around 1400 when they knew how to honor professors.
The full-length figure of the entombed is in his academicals. Below on the main face he lectures from his canopied chair while hordes of eager students take down his every word.
Ah, the good old days! Click on the picture to go to the photo stream and see another, more charming tomb slab. I think I want one with books as my foot rests.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:01 PM
March 29, 2009
Artistic Bologna
There are a lot of old friends in Bologna, like the Neptune fountain, the statue of Boniface VIII, the two towers. These panels, 3 of the 10 (I think?) Jacopo della Quercia carved to flank the doorways of San Petronio, are really capital-G GREAT. The center of the 3 I have for you here is the Expulsion from Paradise. I once wrote a lot about the triangular negative space between the archangel and Adam - you can see what Michelangelo learned from jacopo, if you think about similar dynamic poses in the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2009
Pushback against moral claims of ownership
Yale University is resisting a claim that because the Soviet Union seized Van Gogh's The Night Café the University should return the painting to the 1918-owner's heir. Here's the AP story. Indeed, Yale is initiating a lawsuit to assert a claim to the picture. Interesting!
via InsideHigherEd
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:37 PM | Comments (0)
Freiburg Tornadoes
The weather has gone to hell here - no tornadoes other than sculptural ones, but it's suddenly chilly again and rainy. Oh, well - I flee to Italy soon.
Click on the picture to go to the flickr stream to see a top view, taken from the spiral staircase, of this Tornado. It's slowly filling up with bottle caps, gum, and small change.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:27 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2009
Finally something good out of the Getty's dealings with Italy
The Getty is going to cooperate with Italian institutions to bring shows to America from Italian museums - go here to read about the first one and see a splendid image of the Chimera of Arezzo! And in an interesting concept, they're going to concentrate on important objects from little-visited museums - places off the tourist track.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:01 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2009
Is that Wasserspeier looking at me?
It certainly seems so!
I made it to the upper levels of the Münsterturm today and the views of the cathedral itself and out from the building were fantastic - click and see.
One odd thing I noticed - the late 15th C east end doesn't quite line up with the 13th C nave - click here and look at the roofs - the fact that the choir is higher isn't the problem - but it doesn't line up exactly!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:40 PM
March 18, 2009
Hmmm - this appointment does make "Archaeology in Rome" sound troubled
The Italian government has tapped the man who handled the Naples garbage crisis to deal with another emergency -- the shabby state of many ancient monuments in Rome.Guido Bertolaso has been named special commissioner for the archaeological treasures in the Italian capital and nearby Ostia, the city's ancient port, the Culture Ministry said Tuesday.
The government also approved some euro37 million ($48 million) in funding to restore monuments that have been partially or completely closed to the public and were further damaged by this winter's unusually heavy rains.
Here's the coverage from Repubblica.it - not any more detail, though it does hint at the struggle he's going to have with the Soprintendenza, the standing authority over archeological sites.
Yes, the collapse of some of the supporting walls at the Palatine last year was really worrying - and the Golden House of Nero is closed more often than it's open. Not that I find it a particularly useful site for anyone who doesn't already know it well to VISIT, because it's so chopped up by later imperial construction, but it could be much better handled.
It's really the person who is interesting here - Bertolaso has a reputation for fixing things. How successfully I'm not sure, but it will be good to see what happens. His career is symptomatic of Italian politics somehow - crisis driven. Here's his Italian wikipedia entry - I'm surprised he doesn't have one in English.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:39 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2009
Focus
Yes, really, I went all that way for this photograph.
Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, reports that shortly before Charles died the word PRINCEPS faded from the inscription sinopide scriptum, "written in red."
Magical thinking, or prophecy?
The mosaic inscription as it stands is a 19th Century restoration - but I like it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:05 PM | Comments (1)
March 15, 2009
Sorry for the radio silence
But I was visiting someplace I think about way too often. More pictures to follow. I took 130 in Aachen - about half of which were useful. Digital is great! Um - Cologne. Köln. That too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:34 PM | Comments (1)
March 12, 2009
Münster - Lent altar hanging
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:18 PM
March 11, 2009
The Luxury market cuts back on salaries
Sotheby's head takes a big cut. His compensation package makes for interesting reading. Talk about a success story, though - from "typist in the rug department" to $10.3 million last year.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2009
France for a day!
I had a great - if somewhat museologically frustrating - day yesterday!
I woke up to much nicer weather than predicted - cold but blue and clear. I had been talking about heading to Colmar in Alsace all week and my friend Brenda agreed to go with me. On the platform at the train station (train to Breisach at the Rhein, then bus to Colmar) we ran into two other students from the Goethe-Institut. The excursion far I had already bought was good for up to five people for 24 hours anywhere in the Alsace, so they came along on our ticket - suddenly reducing the price to 5 euros per person (I still need to find the key combination for EURO).
So we get to Colmar at 11.35 and split up - Brenda, who's seriously Francophiliac, needed to eat something and went omelet-hunting. The Ukrainian girls were wandering. I went to the Musée Unterlinden to see the Isenheim Altarpiece, one of the most amazing things in Late Medieval or Northern Renaissance art. Closed from noon till 2 - last admissions at 11.30.
So I went in search of the former Dominican church, which has Martin Schongauer's Virgin in the Rose Garden altarpiece. Closed for the winter months.
So then I had lunch myself - a nice piece of Quiche Lorraine (after all, when in Alsace-Lorraine) and sat outside sketching - it really was that warm in the sun!
At two Brenda and I went into the museum and dashed to the Isenheim altarpiece. I spent 30 minutes wandering around the room - they have disarticulated the wings and mounted them very well - click to see a general view of the room, which was the former chapel. We left at 2.30, met the Ukrainian girls, and took the bus back across the Rhine to Breisach and the train to Freiburg. The next bus wouldn't have been until 7 p.m., and that would have been a bit much museum-going even for me.
So, alas, I didn't get to see the rest of the splendid collection, but I did get to wander around Colmar, which is charming, and see some evidence of the Alsatian Language (the 2nd most commonly spoken regional language in France after Occitan, according to Wikipedia). Click to see a poster celebrating unseri Sproch, which would be unsere Sprache in Hochdeutsch.
All in all a great day out of Freiburg - and in France within in 30 minutes!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:39 AM | Comments (1)
March 2, 2009
Well this is certainly a way to make sure no auction house ever accepts your agency's bids!
A Chinese man who bid nearly $40 million for a pair of controversial antique Chinese statues saidMonday [sic] he is refusing to pay for them Monday, state media reported.Cai Mingchao, who works for China's National Treasures Fund, placed the winning bid by phone at a February 25 auction of artefacts once owned by fashion designer Yves St. Laurent, the Xinhua news agency reported.
[my emphasis]"What I want to stress is that this money cannot be paid," Cai said at a news conference, according to Xinhua.
You know, if the job description of this agency is to recover goods claimed by the nation of China they'll have to do it by lawsuits - no one is going to trust them as honest players in a market situation. And making a case for the rights of the current government of China to these things is really kind of tricky.
Bloomberg.com's version makes the bidder sound more like a showboater. It also has pictures.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2009
Would you pay 9 million euros for THIS?
Click and think. Me, no. Everything I like about Gericault involves the barely suppressed sexual hysteria of most of his big works. His portraiture has never done much for me - and ringletted children? I guess if you cared that it was from the Yves St Laurent collection that would help, but I wouldn't find that helpful, either.
Oh, well - no understanding collectors.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2009
St George Fountain, Freiburg Münsterplatz
I'd have thought that even a slain dragon would throw off enough residual heat to melt snow!
It's not snowy here today, but it is sunny and cold - maybe more photographs!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM | Comments (1)
February 16, 2009
Hot Spots of the 50s and 60s
The Kunsthaus in Zürich mounted a big and quite good show: Hot Spots. Rio de Janeiro / Milano - Torino / Los Angeles 1956 - 1969. They had lots of good things in the American section; I liked the Ruscha picture (one of the giant gas stations) and the art books best in the Los Angeles section. I want a copy of Every Building on Sunset Strip, if anyone's starting his Christmas shopping. It's a linear piece - a long fold out with an absence running down the center to represent the street, houses and businesses flopped out on either side. You can see a version here - click and scroll (it's an interesting article). I myself am reminded much less of "art" than a piece of real cartography I blogged about some time ago, a fold out map of the Hudson River for mid-19th C steamer passagers to Albany from New York City. The engraver set views of both banks of the Hudson on either side of the long page - the east side pointing down, the west side pointing up (if that makes sense). I can't find an image of it, but I saw it mounted on a long wall at the Museum of the New-York Historical Society.
The museum also had a brilliant touch-screen version of three other artist books from Ruscha - flippable! On the other hand, Sam Francis should sue over the hanging of his painting.
The objects I liked best over all were some great hanging sculptures by a Brazilian artist, Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Of course there were no photographs allowed and of course I can't find any on the web - they were angular objects - some X-shaped, some, some simpler, with thickness produced in interesting ways by layering wood and pulling apart the layers. They don't photograph well, but you can see some here. You really have to be able to move around them to see what's going on. This photo of one at the Tate gives an idea of what he's up to, but it's not monochrome (or as close to monochrome) as the ones in Zürich. I liked them a lot - and I don't like minimalist things much.
The Italian section was long on Arte Povera, which I never like much. There were a lot of Lucio Fontana cut canvases - enough of them that the schtick of "cutting through the picture plane to see what's beyond" got really old. On the other hand, there was a spatial installation created originally for Documenta 4 in 1968 - it was a white maze of walls with a cut canvas at its heart. That worked as more than just an idea. I also liked seeing something I'd read about, some Giovanni Colombo kinetic pieces playing with the idea of gridding in paintings and sculpture - the grids literally shifted (they were made of elastic bands or metal rods and moved). That was fun, but pretty gimmicky.
All in all a show worth seeing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:34 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2009
Welcome to the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
I meant to link to this before - the more manuscripts the merrier.
Further - sorry, I pasted a malformed link - it should work now!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:49 PM | Comments (2)
February 2, 2009
I'm in the land of the almighty Euro
Made it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:28 AM | Comments (5)
January 31, 2009
Mile Zero - Chickamauga Dam
I took the Tennessee Riverwalk yesterday - click and see.
It was a nice farewell to Chattanooga after a happy visit here.
Next pictures from Frankfurt!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:07 AM
Why close the museum? To sell the art!
More on Brandeis from Felix Salmon at Portfolio, who found out about the bizarro valuation at $1 for each piece of art!
Clearly, Brandeis has come to the conclusion that by shutting down the museum, it can ignore all rules pertaining to deaccessioning, and worry only about the strings attached by donors to individual artworks.Nathan also said something else which was extremely interesting to me: apparently all of the Rose Art Museum's artworks are considered to be assets of the university endowment, valued at $1 each. All the proceeds from the sale of any artwork, then, is automatically a desperately-needed capital gain for the endowment.
[my emphasis]
This is one of the most underhanded financial twists I've seen a university do in a long time! Because they value each asset at $1, every actual sale will be a capital gain! Yay! Whoever thought that one up deserves a bonus - a big bonus! Maybe even a John Thain-style office makeover.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM
January 30, 2009
So is it a masterpiece by Goya, a masterpiece by another hand, or have you changed your opinion of the painting entirely?
I think that's the question I would like to use to survey the specialists about The Colossus, which may or may not be a Goya.
You see, I specialize in a period without names - and medievalists see the problems created by the idolization of genius artists very clearly. Plenty of folks who specialize in fields with better attributions to individuals, from Chinese scroll paintings to the present, see the problem, but let's face it - lots of people don't see or won't admit a problem.
The questions: If the label changes to The Colossus, Asensio Juliá, will as many editors include the work in textbooks? Will the Prado keep it out all the time? Does your opinion of Goya change, or your opinion of the painting?
Here's an example of the Genius Artist approach in the Times Online:
Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work. He told the Spanish newspaper ABC: "I never said it would be impossible that [someone else] might have intervened in the work of Goya, but the painting is too audacious to be by Asensio Juliá, because of the centrifugal strength of the composition and its iconic power. I hope to be able to see the study and the proofs."
Well, maybe he's been overestimating Goya or underestimating Juliá all these years - given that his own apprehension of iconic power depends on his belief that this painting is by Goya, even though he's dressing it up with some formalist language (composition). One of the great founders of formalist analysis of art, Heinrich Wölflin, called for an art history without names and never got it. Will Glendinning's opinion of Goya change, or his opinion of the painting change? What he's saying is that it's a masterpiece and therefore it must have been created by a certified genius. Goya. We'll see. But the medievalists are in the corner, nudging each other and laughing quietly.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
January 29, 2009
Brandeis museum situation
Clearly the Brandeis board has been considering art as an investment all these years, and thinking of gifts of art just like gifts to the endowment. When I first heard the talk about shutting down the museum and selling its contents I thought this was a scare tactic to force some major gifts out of the art folks - you know, "we have a $10 million deficit this year - give us $7.5 million or we'll sell the collection."
Now I'm not so sure. In today's story in the Boston Globe we read:
Among those joining the chorus of outrage yesterday was Lois Foster, the widow of a former Brandeis trustee, for whom a new museum wing is named.In an interview, Foster said university trustees raised the idea of closing the Rose a decade ago, recognizing the potential millions that could be raised by selling off a collection that includes works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and de Kooning.
Her late husband, Henry, "talked for hours to get them to change their minds, and they did," Lois Foster recalled yesterday.
Eventually, the Fosters gave more than $5 million to the school for the museum's Lois Foster Wing, which opened in 2001.
At least according to Mrs. Foster they did use the scare tactic technique on her husband a decade ago - but now they seem to be in earnest about selling.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 AM | Comments (1)
January 26, 2009
Annals of creative mis-reading
When I opened my Google News this morning the headline right at the bottom of the page caught my eye, but I misread it something awful. Pfizer to buy Wyeth for $68 billion. I thought to myself "that's a lot of money to pay for a Wyeth, even if his IS dead now. That thought didn't last long - I swear. Hey - I had only had one cup of coffee!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM | Comments (1)
January 24, 2009
There are layoffs and then there are layoffs
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2009
A vicious art critic
A former security guard who slashed a $1.2 million Art Institute painting on loan to a Pittsburgh museum has pleaded guilty to "institutional vandalism.''Timur Serebrykov, 28, who was a guard at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, reportedly told police that he cut the artwork with a key last May because "I didn't like the painting.''
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2009
Manhole Covers and Representational Art
I don't think the Scenic City landscape seal (click here and scroll down to see the full color version of the seal) works well in this context.
Oh - that's a spurt of pink paint in the center of the picture plane, not a photographic problem.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2009
Precision bombing before smart bombs
One of the people who destroyed Axis military targets but saved Venice:
The medals of a wartime flying ace who was given the delicate job of leading an attack on enemy ships in Venice docks without destroying the city's historic buildings and priceless works of art are being sold at auction next week.In 1945, Group Captain George Westlake headed Operation Bowler, so called because he and others feared they would be "bowler hatted" - thrown out of the military back into civilian life - if their attack was not precise enough.
. . .
After his retirement, Westlake lived in Warwickshire and got around on an electric tricycle. Neighbours said he rode it as if he was still in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft. He died two years ago, aged 87.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
January 2, 2009
Bubbles, art market edition
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)
Madoff and Art Theft
Instead of practicing crime against others, Madoff is on the receiving end of this one. It's a little arch, since the thieves didn't actually do anything with the art. Practical jokes. Eh.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:51 AM | Comments (0)
December 30, 2008
Good enough for government work - disappearing British art collection
Works of art worth hundreds of thousands of pounds are missing from British embassies and other official buildings around the world.At least 50 paintings from the Government Art Collection are unaccounted for, according to the latest audit. None was insured. Some are known to have been stolen but more than half the total simply disappeared.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:08 AM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2008
The FBI agent in charge of art theft and fraud retires
Artdaily.org has a story about the coming retirement of Special Agent Robert K. Wittman, who has been working for 20 years on art theft for the FBI. I expect there will be a memoir out soon - and a movie! It's a little bit of a tease that Artdaily.org puts the Isabella Stewart Gardner Vermeer, The Concert, at the top of the page to illustrate the story. After all, that's never been recovered. Here's the FBI page on the theft.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:55 AM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2008
Picture Buying for the Nation
50 million pounds is a lot to raise, even for a Titian. And when they succeed, they get four years to raise the purchase price for the companion piece.
The Scottish government will this week announce that it will donate about £10m, while the National Gallery in London will pledge about £12m and the National Galleries of Scotland a further £2m.Money will also come from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Until now, £11m had been publicly pledged. Another £8m is coming from private donors.
This weekend sources close to the campaign said they were confident that the £50m total would be reached before the December 31 deadline.
The Titian and its companion piece, Diana and Callisto, belong to the seventh Duke of Sutherland and form part of his Bridgewater collection, which has been on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland since 1945.
If the galleries secure Diana and Actaeon, they will have a further four years to buy the sister work.
Once saved, Diana and Actaeon, which is regarded as one of the finest Renaissance works in private hands, will be shared by the national galleries in Edinburgh and London, with each taking it for five years at a time.
(My emphases.)
That in private hands is a little odd, coupled with the on loan...since 1945. Oh, well - I'm happy the folks of Edinburgh will get to see this Titian whenever they like, though this plea seems a little over the top. The sale of a picture doesn't destroy its beauty. Was it ever likely to go off public display? I doubt it - but it would have left Edinburgh. Indeed, even now that it has been saved, it will be in London half of the time.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:38 AM
December 16, 2008
Korean treasures
Koreans get involved (there doesn't seem to be anything official about the delegation, so I don't think we should say "Korea gets involved") in asking museums to return shadily-collected objects.
A Seoul Metropolitan Council member and Buddhist monks will fly to the United States to seek to retrieve a cultural art piece that was stolen during Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945).Council member Boo Doo-wan, Ven. Hyemun, and Lee Sang-geun, secretary of the Buddhists Jogye Order, will visit the U.S. from Jan. 7 to 8 to ask the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to return a reliquary that contains relics of Buddha and other high ranking monks.
The 22.5 centimeter-high "Silver-plated Lamaist Stupa" has the shape of a Lamaist pagoda and is assumed to have been made during the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392) and kept at Hoiam Temple until it was seized by Japanese colonial authorities in 1939. The Boston Museum has allegedly bought the piece from Japan.
Here's the MFA's page for the object, the Sarira Reliquary. The text there implies that the relics are no longer inside the reliquary (past tense, "held minute relics of the Historica Buddha Shakyamuni, two other Buddhas and two eminent priests").
I'm not certain how this piece got from Korea to Japan to Boston; the MFA leaves us with the cryptic "Weld Collection, by Exchange, June 8, 1939. See Registration folder No. 57." Charles Goddard Weld bought the Fenollosa collection and loaned it to the MFA (and it eventually ended up permanently there). I have no idea why I half-knew that, but wikipedia came to the rescue. I wonder if in 1939 the MFA exchanged some nice bits of the Japanese art in the Weld collection for the Korean reliquary?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:31 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2008
The finest private collection of Pooh-stuff hits the market soon
This is a neat story - and with a lovely illustration. That's a collecting obsession I can understand.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2008
"if you're stuck for what to slip in your favourite lover of totalitarian kitsch's Christmas stocking, then your problems have been solved."
Now here's an entry for Christmas shopping guides, "if you're stuck for what to slip in your favourite lover of totalitarian kitsch's Christmas stocking, then your problems have been solved." I found that in a review of Love me Turkmenistan, a coffee table book about the late dictator of Turkmenistan and his cult of personality.
For ordering information - and pictures! - Love me Turkmenistan.
The Amazon page is much duller.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:55 AM | Comments (1)
December 10, 2008
Museum sponsorship dries up in London?
This is a bad sign for museum shows in the UK - the Royal Academy couldn't find corporate sponsorship for an exhibition celebrating the 500th birthday of Palladio, certainly one of the greatest of all architects. They had to ask actual architects to subsidize the show.
Lord Rogers of Riverside and Lord Foster of Thames Bank are among a group of Royal Academicians who stepped in to save the show about Andrea Palladio, the "first professional architect", which opens next month.
Their action is the first clear evidence that the financial crisis in the City is threatening cultural institutions. The bubble around contemporary art prices has already burst.
Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy, said: "It is going to bite into corporate sponsorship because the traditional sponsors were the big City institutions."
Last month Mark Jones, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and chairman of the National Museum Directors' Conference, said that businesses were spending perceptibly less on culture, making it harder for museums to find sponsorship and costing them thousands of pounds in lost corporate entertainment revenue.
Ah - it's not just sponsorship, it's also the catering fees for letting them host corporate parties in your space. Hmm - perhaps the whole late 20th Century business model of museums - build a big atrium and fill it with folding tables instead of art - is failing?
The show should be worth seeing, though, and opens next month.
Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy will be the first London exhibition devoted to the Venetian architect in 30 years and celebrates the 500th anniversary of his birth. According to MaryAnne Stevens, the co-curator of the exhibition: "He matters because he is really the first professional architect and still one consistently revered by those contemporary architects who pay attention to the past." In the early 18th century the 3rd Earl of Burlington remodelled the Piccadilly building that now houses the Royal Academy in the "Palladian" style.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:51 AM
December 2, 2008
Amber necklace found in Manchester
Big ol' amber necklace from the early Bronze Age found in England - a long way from the Baltic sources. Picture here. This one is not an amateur find!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:11 AM | Comments (0)
Year in Metal Detectorism Review
The BBC posts a round-up article on some of the most splendid finds of the year - with a slide show of good photographs!
Here are the two most significant sentences about policy and amateur archaeology:
The Treasure Act in 1996 ruled that finders and landowners would be eligible for rewards for finds.Museums have since reported a 10-fold increase in items of treasure offered to them.
What used to happen to finds? Well, less was found before metal detectors were invented and became popular, but what was found sometimes took the same path into local museums but otherwise might have sat on shelves in houses around Britain or have been sold on the private market without ever being documented.
Now, at least, someone's keeping some serious attention on what turns up. The Portable Antiquities Scheme site is a great place to watch the process - I visit often!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:02 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2008
Art liability?
Man With Apple Hovering in Front of Face Sues René Magritte's Estate.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)
The 2nd Largest Armor Collection in NYC
I knew about the fin de siècle Viennese art at the Neue Gallerie, but I didn't know that Ronald Lauder collected medieval and renaissance arms and armor! Interesting! Some of the collection is on loan to the Met, so I guess it will end up there.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:03 PM | Comments (0)
Joern Utzon - putting the "eccentric" back into "visionary architect"
I knew that the Sydney Opera House is a disastrous piece of public sculpture. I think I first read about the Opera House (as opposed to seeing photos) in one of those books on modern disasters (ah, here it is - Great Planning Disasters, Peter Hall). It came in at fifteen times the original budget, so however pretty you think it is don't tell me it's a good building. It's sculpture. Striking sculpture - the kind of thing that every city wishes it had, and is busy hiring Santiago Calatrava to get - but not a building.
What I didn't know is that, though Joern Utzon continued to work on the building into the 21st century - you know, restoring his vision to the interior, and wouldn't we like to hear what the budget was on that? - he refused to visit ever again after stomping off the site in 1966, 7 years before the formal opening.
Here's an article from Bloomberg.
Here's a point/counterpoint from 2005 from the Sydney Morning Herald. There's no defense of the building except as a sentimental favorite of visitors. One does wonder what $100 million dollars invested in music subsidies in Australia around 1970 would have accomplished.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2008
Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings
Welcome to Carnivalesque 45 - a blog carnival of Ancient and Medieval findings!
Lots of people are talking conferences - it's a way of not thinking about grading, of course. J. J. Cohen at In the Middle gets some organizational information about what sort of audience to expect for his paper at the Leeds Congress and breaks out into a rash:
Yeah, nooo pressure at all. I'll just wear a nice suit and juggle oranges on a unicycle while reading from my translation of Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself into medieval Latin. Slowly.
Dr. Virago complains at Quod She about her future office, but then she shows pictures of the Modern Panopticon! She's right - those are a lot of windows to clap to.
What brings people to the blogs they read? Jonthan Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe (IN a Corner of Tenth-Century Europe? I'm not sure) looks at his referrer logs and decides to do something for the searchers.
If I leave aside the porn searches and count only strings that look academic, the two things that bring people to this blog from search engines more than anything else are, firstly, my piece on the First Crusade, which is good as that's what it's there for, and secondly, the piece I wrote about Charles the Simple, because it includes a reference to and a map of the Treaty of Verdun. It's searches for "treaty of Verdun" that bring people to that, and they can't really be getting what they want out of it. I'm not going to try and fill that gap here, because there are already better sites out there explaining what the Treaty was, but I will do two things. Firstly, I will make an important point about the Treaty's effect, and then I will do what I do best, or at least most, and tell you a story from a charter that helps to illustrate the sort of thing that was going on.
Dr. Weevil is also checking meta-blog information. He blogged a bit from 14th century essayist Yoshida Kenko that reminded him of the essence of blogging:
If I fail to say what lies on my mind it gives me a feeling of flatulence; I shall therefore give my brush free rein. Mine is a foolish diversion, but these pages are meant to be torn up, and no one is likely to see them. (Kenko, Essays in Idleness 19, tr. Donald Keene)
Belatedly wondering if anyone else had quoted Kenko's proto-blogger manifesto, I did a Google search on "Kenko + blogger + Idleness + flatulence". The first result of "about 93" was my own 11:57pm post, dated (timed?) "9 minutes ago", which means that Google had it in their database approximately 25 minutes after I posted it. I would be less impressed if I had even 0.1% (e.g.) InstaPundit's traffic.
Speaking of meta-blogging, how many of us started out as anonymous bloggers only to be outed? Or noticed? It just happened to Another Damned Medievalist.
Disiecta membra! Got to love them! Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval shows us a marginal guy ripping himself apart! And monkeys!
We don't always have to reinterpret the same ol' same ol' - we can dig up new stuff! But then we find ourselves in an arms race with, you know, the public. Who sometimes dig things up without consulting the experts. Alun Salt at Archeoastronomy considers all sorts of issues along these lines - starting with Great Britain's current finding regime, the Portable Antiquity Scheme. The broader consideration is of how we might encourage a world in which a conserved heritage is more valuable than a marketed heritage. Lots of links for people interested in ethics and morals of archaeology. Here's the Portable Antiquity Scheme in case you don't already have it bookmarked.
Talking about the ethics and morality of archaeology, Dr. Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology offers a guest entry by Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex - who manages to go to a lecture and restrain himself from standing up and shouting by taking diligent notes:
A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus was rather full: I believe there were 650 to 700 people there. It was a strange feeling, being in the same room as all those people and knowing that most of them would probably believe what Däniken was going to tell them.
Speaking of aliens, Michael Drout, in his only political blog posting, asked Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?
Gesta at On Boundaries posted on a Chris Wickham lecture, 'The problem of the dialogues between medieval history and medieval archaeology.' Gesta links comments on the same lecture by Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra et Mater, and notes:
What is interesting from my point of view is that clearly I had my teaching head on rather than my research head in this lecture. While Magistra and Jonathan were mulling over the implications for the way they write history, I was pondering how we start to address the problems at undergrad level. I fear I am becoming institutionalised.
Do you know what Zenobia really looked like? Judith Weingarten has some ideas. Coin pictures at Zenobia, Empress of the East!
And since we're turning to the classical world, let's talk Classics as a major - and one of those awkward conversations we sometimes have this time of year during registration for Spring classes. Are your students declaring majors? Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has Ed Turner's letter to young Ted Turner (yeah, that Ted Turner) on the subject. Ed wrote:
"I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on my way home today."
How would you help Ted answer Ed?*
Edward Cook at Ralph the Sacred River tells us why the Jesus Bowl is just another crock. Everyone loves Magic Bowls, but this one's nothing special.
And a different sort of bowl - and back to the idea of the morality of digging up or owning things, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber talks about buying a Song dynasty bowl. Read the comments.
Just remember, don't go buying things as if the sales catalog is accurate! David Nishimura at Cronaca pointed out a couple of stories about a Fatimid ewer selling at Christie's for 3.2 million pounds. The same piece had been cataloged in January of 2008 as a 19th century claret jug and valued at 100-300 pounds. Jug, ewer - is it the price point that inflects the nomenclature? Whatever - caveat emptor!
The December 2008 
(early modern) will be hosted at Investigations of a Dog. Go make suggestions!
*Fun fact to know and tell - Ted Turner started Latin under the same man I did, W.O.E.A. Humphreys at the McCallie School. Note that I am not listed as one of the notable alumni.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 PM
November 20, 2008
Early Medieval Church Silver at Dumbarton Oaks
I got to visit Dumbarton Oaks last weekend with my nephews (and sister!) - the Sion Treasure is a highlight for me. It was the perfect preparation for someone to spend the week reading the Liber Pontificalis and its telegraphic mentions of the largesse of the popes. Here's what the LP (in Davis's translation, linked above) says Paschal I gave to the church of Santa Caecilia, which he rebuilt:
For love of the venerable saints [Agatha and Caecilia], to decorate this church [Sta Caecilia in Trastevere] this holy prelate provided an apse adorned with mosaic and a silver canopy of wondrous size, weighing 600 lb 8 oz. He finished and marvellously embellished the holy altar's propitatorium* and the confessio** inside and out, and its grills, with silver sheets, weighing in all 154 lb 15 oz. At this virgin's holy body he presented an image of silver sheets weighing 95 lb. In front of the altar's vestibule he provided a cornice covered in silver sheets and 2 columns, where he placed 1 arch and 2 chevrons, weighing in all 100 1/2 lb. There too he presented 3 sliver-gilt images weighing 48 1/2 lb. For this church's arches this prelate provided 26 great silver chalices weighing in all 109 1/2 lb. There too he presented 2 silver canisters*** with six wicks, weighing 2 lb 9 oz; a fine gold bowl weighing 3 lb. This pontiff provided 2 silver canisters with nine wicks, weighing 10 lb; 3 silver bowls weighing 5 lb.; a silver gilt thurible weighing 1 lb. (LP, Life 100: chapters 19-20)
And that's before the biographer lists the fabrics Paschal donated.
This kind of amazing silver work - Dumbarton Oaks' example probably coming from a provincial monastery in Lycia in Anatolia - was not uncommon in the Mediterranean world. Click and see two other views of the stuff from the same site.
The inscriptions in silver are also splendid and eye-catching - and help liven up for me some of the tedious textual inscriptions I study as evidence for how patrons wanted people to see and use their buildings.
Moments like this also make the neo-Baroque so common in modern 1962 Missal arrangements seem quite dull. This is real silver, not gold leaf or gold thread embroidery. Imagine what people thought about their altars in the 6th century as opposed to what we might surmise from the plaster and gold leaf decorations of the 17th?
*propitatorium - well, it's the word the Vulgate uses for whatever was on top of the Ark of the Covenant - what the KJV calls the "mercy seat." It doesn't show up often in the Liber Pontificalis, so we're not exactly sure what it is except that it was associated with the altar. Some people translate it as "altar frontal." I find that more convincing than "ciborium" or some kind of rear ledge over the altar.
**confessio - the container for the body of the saint.
***cannister - some kind of cylindrical floor-based oil lamp
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 PM | Comments (2)
The Cleveland Museum takes its turn sending things back to Italy
The Cleveland Museum will return 14 out of 42 objects the Italian government asked for - and they're still negotiating about a larger statue. Go look at the slideshow here. I like the Mule-head Rhyton!
In a change from the usual story, one of the objects is medieval, a processional cross stolen from a church which the Museum bought in the 1970s.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2008
I'm hosting Carnivalesque and I haven't sent out any invitations!
Well, I keep saying I'm having a Christmas party and I haven't even chosen a date, either.
Hey - if you have an Ancient or Medieval bit of bloggery to suggest or show off in the November , which I hope to go live with on Monday, you can either email me at thecrankyprofessor AT gmail DOT com, send a message to the carnival email address (carnivalesque AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk), or use the nomination form.
Here's the previous Carnivalesque I hosted, way back in 2005.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2008
"Beautiful Artemis Thor Neptune Odin Delusional Sapphic Inspirational Hypnosis Painting" fails to sell
And it couldn't happen to the reputation of a nicer artist, Damien Hirst. Click to see. Actually, it was a bad night all around for sellers.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:34 AM
November 13, 2008
Someone training for the wrong line of work at the University of Iowa
UI anthropology student Morgan Hansen, who is seeking a certificate in museum studies, felt "unnerved" by the idea that art could have been stolen during the flood.
That's a student who should consider other degree certifications; she's quoted about the University of Iowa's failure during the floods this year to move all the art objects to safe storage and then back again without a few things going missing.
OF COURSE people steal from art museums during natural disasters, and one should automatically plan to watch the movers carefully. Never heard of things "falling off the truck?" Maybe she shouldn't go into museum work - she's too optimistic about human nature.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)
New Medieval (and Renaissance) Wing at the Victoria & Albert!
30 Million Pounds is a nice thing to hear for medieval museum wings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:38 AM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2008
Returning Art Looted by the Nazis
After 10 years of detective work, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has concluded that a $2.8 million painting it has owned for decades was stolen by the Nazis. The museum has returned the 1911 painting, Fernand Leger's "Smoke Over Rooftops," to the French heirs of a Jewish art collector who died in 1948."Having researched this to the end of the road, we decided we had to return the painting; it was the right thing to do," said Art Institute Director Kaywin Feldman.
Other museums have faced similar challenges to their collections. The institute's saga began in 1997 when the museum received a letter claiming that the painting had been taken from Alphonse Kann, a legendary French collector who owned "tons of Picassos, Braques and late-19th-century Impressionist paintings," according to Patrick Noon, the institute's paintings curator. His story helped inspire a 1964 movie, "The Train," starring Burt Lancaster, about a trainload of art that the Germans tried to spirit away before the Allies liberated Paris in 1944.
First they had to decide this was the right one - Leger painted at least 5 other "Smoke Over Rooftops." Then they had to deal with the awkward sales history - once in 1942 to one Parisian gallery owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the great dealer in everything Cubist and a German Jew himself, and once to a second gallery owned by a German specialist in selling degenerate modern art for and to the Nazis.
It sounds like this was an expensive process, and the MIA hasn't released a figure yet. The conclusion, though, says something about the strength of their collection:
Initially the museum hoped Kann's heirs would lend or give it to the museum but that proved impossible. Asked if the institute would try to buy it back if the Leger were to be offered at auction, Feldman and Noon smiled ruefully and shook their heads."We have two other very nice Leger paintings in the collection," Noon said.
If art history undergraduates ask why they should learn French and German (and Russian would be useful for this line of work, too), tell them this story.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2008
Arts Fundraising
The Metropolitan Opera raised $128.1 million this year, followed by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at $123.9 million. The next three winners are performance oriented; number 5, though, was the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens at $52.3 million. My!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2008
Architecture for our times, or for life before the bust?
Zaha Hadid finally has a building in the rain in New York City - but it's a temporary shrine to Chanel handbags in Central Park.
It's a transportable art gallery commissioned by fashion designer Lagerfeld, the luxury-goods company's artistic director, and designed by Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, to house artworks inspired by Chanel's iconic quilted purse on a chain, known as the 2.55.
The Chanel Pavilion is made up of hundreds of glossy white fiberglass panels that can be assembled and dismantled over a steel frame in a matter of weeks. Structure and show, known as Mobile Art, will be open to the public in New York, after stints in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Oct. 24 to Nov. 9, then move on to London, Moscow and Paris. Admission is free if you reserve in advance at the on-site ticket booth.
And here I thought she was supposed to be a Marxist.
Here's a review from Bloomberg.muse, which ends "My wish is for Hadid to give New York a building that doesn't disappear after three weeks."
Here are my previous speculations about Hadid.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:04 AM | Comments (1)
Using Art to talk about elections, or elections to talk about art?
Well, it's probably fair either way - need a teaching resource for elections? Use a Caleb Bingham 1852 painting, The County Election and the resource guide from the National Endowment for the Humanities called Picturing America to drive the K-12 classroom discussion. The quick introduction points out:
* It depicts an election that took place in 1850, in Saline County, Missouri.
* The artist had, in fact, run for a place in the State Legislature during this election.
* There is one African American present in the scene.
* There is one more African American present in the scene than there is a woman.
* In one canvas, there exists the perfect opportunity to discuss and reflect upon the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Just saying.
I came across this on about.com's art history page.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:40 AM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2008
The Things People dig up but don't sell illegally in the UK.
Here's a well-photographed example of a medieval seal - this one showing the murder of St. Thomas à Becket. The community where it was found by a metal detectorist, Richmond, North Yorkshire, is raising money to buy the seal and keep it on display. This little bit of the article shows the difference between looting of objects in America and Italy, say (something I blog about sometimes) and the UK, where cooperation with metal detectorists is the rule. There's a dispute about the division of a portion of the sale price:
[The seal matrix] was found by metal detecting enthusiast Carl Richardson, of Coxhoe, County Durham, in October 2006.An ownership dispute ensued, involving Mr Richardson, fellow treasure seeker Richard Hunter, from Peterlee, east Durham, and landowner John Wray, which will be resolved by the British Museum.
Those deemed to have a genuine interest in the item will share the proceeds of its sale.
See? The promise of a fair price gets people to turn things in! Respect for property rights of the land owner and the finder - though in dispute - are respected.
And really - it's a very nice seal - a priest holding a cross, Becket kneeling, the 3 soldiers hacking at his head with a sword. Underneath a man praying interrupts the seal-circling text - very elegant.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2008
Best headline and subhead so far for the effect of the financial crisis on the art world!
ART adviser Michael Reid calls them the "alpha male business people who need to own more than they want to own".
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2008
Freud's portrait of Bacon for sale
Another article about the Francis Bacon / Lucien Freud relationship, but with a great line:
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:28 PM | Comments (0)
Click the link for beauty
I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about a show of Mughal prints at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (it's at the Van Gogh because the Rijksmuseum is still under renovation). Click here to see one amazing elephant. You'll thank me.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:42 AM | Comments (1)
October 14, 2008
Corporate Art Collection Changes
Here's an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal Online about changes in corporate art collections - not just current news about what may happen to the large Lehman collection, but some historical comparison. The article discusses going-out-of-business sales like Arthur Andersen and corporate moves, whether into smaller spaces or just different kinds of space where art collections feel wrong. A dramatic example, Philip Morris becomes Altria and moves from New York City to Richmond - and begins collecting Virginia artists. There's even a placement service:
The question of what to do with no-longer-wanted company artwork received one answer from the New York-based Business Committee for the Arts, which in 2006 established the From Workplaces to Public Spaces program. In its first two years, the program has placed about 1,000 artworks deaccessioned by Manhattan-based businesses in 16 hospitals, schools and cultural organizations in the Greater New York area. Among the corporations that have donated posters and original artwork to the From Workplaces program are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Pfizer, and the cumulative value of this art is in excess of $275,000. Among the recipients are Medgar Evers College, Hospital Audiences Inc., P.S. 20, Tools for Schools Inc., the Henry Street Settlement and Bronx-Lebanon Special Care Center.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM
October 9, 2008
3 Million Pound Pitcher
How did I miss this auction story the other day?
A 1,000-year-old carved rock crystal ewer, one of only seven known surviving examples, fetched 3.2 million pounds at auction on Tuesday, Christie's said.The ewer is the same one that came up for auction in Britain in January this year, when it was catalogued as a 19th century French claret jug and valued at 100-200 pounds.
There's a picture at the link.
Of course, when pitchers are expensive and made of rock crystal, pitchers are ewers - kind of like jugs are vases when they're Greek. And, please, in the words of Miss Manners, it's a vahz when it's filled with dahzies.
via Cronaca
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
October 6, 2008
Weird 20th Century Art Property Law
I don't get this one - why do the heirs of Kazimir Malevich have a right to his work? Was it seized by the Soviet State and then sold? I'm just not clear. The setting is a story from Bloomberg.com about a Malevich sale expected to take a record price.
The idea of restitution of Malevich's art began in 1993 when German art historian Clemens Toussaint scoured the former Soviet Union for Malevich's heirs, Toussaint said in a 1999 interview in St. Petersburg.He convinced the heirs to press a claim for Malevich works held by MoMA and the Stedelijk. In June 1999, MoMA paid the heirs an undisclosed cash settlement, and handed over a 1925 painting, also titled ``Suprematist Composition,'' according to a MoMA press release. MoMA kept the other 15 paintings.
The heirs sold the 1925 ``Suprematist Composition'' at a Phillips International auction in May 2000 for $17 million.
The identity of the Malevich heirs remains a guarded secret, and Toussaint declined to name any.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)
September 30, 2008
The creepiest thing in the Greek Rooms
Aren't these odd? This is a detached pair of eyes, probably Greek 5th Century, for insertion into a statue. Remember that the Greeks painted marble and wood statues to look more naturalistic (they probably polished bronze to look like tanned flesh), added color effects like gilding to hair, and preferred naturalistic eyes. So this pair fell out of something - maybe the wooden head rotted, or the bronze head was broken up and melted.
Mounted this way they are intensely creepy. Yes, they're staring right at me.
Link to the Met page about them.
Click on them to go to my Flickr stream - the side view changes things!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2008
Morandi in New York
I got to run down to New York City this weekend with a friend and do a lot of walking around and enough museuming to hold me for awhile. I managed not to buy anything but food and drink, too - though we bought a lot of those! The best meal was certainly Indian, and I unaccountably forgot to grab a card from the restaurant on the way out. I'm going to be experimenting with chick peas for the immediate future to see if I can do anything like that. But then there were the Chinese baked goods from Canal Street. Yum. And the cute little smoothie-making machine that not only blended but sealed with a stretched plastic top - you know, sort of like a foil-sealed glass of juice. Tasty and hygienic!
The best art-dose was, of all things, Morandi at the Met. Now the Rome program went to the Morandi museum in Bologna this March, so it's not as though I was suffering from some kind of undiagnosed 20th Century still-life deficiency. The show at the Met, though it drew on lots of stuff owned by the museum in Bologna, was more analytical and less chronological - they had lots of multiple-version paintings. There was one group of four paintings from 1937-39 that was especially good for understanding work-technique. The little variations from still-life to still-life are worth contemplating, and I am always amazed by the little landscapes in person. Definitely worth seeing.
The medieval rooms were in disarray in advance of a renovation - most of them were closed or almost empty. We spent a good time in the arms and armor section - there's something very satisfying about the industrial design of life-saving equipment like this, with all the lines designed to slide projectiles away from the torso.
I went and mooned about the classical rooms, of course. There's never a visit without that. There were 4 loaned pieces of Greek pottery with clear-cut signage that they were ON LOAN FROM THE REPUBLIC OF ITALY. None of them struck ME as much consolation for the Sarpedon krater, but whatever.
Lots of wandering - a few pictures. The predicted rain mainly fell elsewhere, so we weren't too sloggy.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2008
MacArthur Genius winner - neat art
I thought I recognized Tara Donovan's work from the description in the news this week about MacArthur prizes, but I couldn't find any confirmation - I saw a big piece at the Birmingham, Alabama, museum when my mother and I went down for the Pompeii show last Christmas. I can't turn it up on a search of their collection, so it must have been a temporary installation.
The work was on the ceiling of the cafe area - and it looked, from a distance, almost like a super-enlarged view of stomach lining. Tripe, you know, something like that. It was beautiful in a creepy way - compelling. I went over and found out that it was made of thousands of styrofoam coffee cups glued to a support structure. It looked remarkably like the piece in the photograph - either another from the same series or actually the same one.
Here's a gallery website with pictures of more art.
Here's the MacArthur write up.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:18 PM | Comments (1)
September 24, 2008
Your German Vocabulary Word for the Day
Arschgeweih - literally, ass antlers. English, tramp stamp.
The things you learn on the internet! I came across Arschgeweih in an encouraging article on the rise of tattoo removal in Germany. If I were in medical school, piercing repair and tattoo removal would be high on my list of skills to acquire.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:39 AM | Comments (1)
Think the economy has you worried?
Bloomsberg.muse has a story with a great teaser paragraph:
In a village in southern China, Wu Ruiqiu is worried about the effect of an economic slump on the art market. He should be. Wu represents artists that make 60 percent of the world's oil paintings.
60% of the world's oil paintings? Well, they may be right. Dafen is an industrial production center for paintings - original and replicas. I'm sure their sales are down.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2008
Despite the Collapse of All Economic Markets, Art Sells
At least Damien Hirst. Be sure to watch the video. One of his animal-floating-in-formaldehyde pieces brought a record price. Here's Hirst in front of the Golden Calf floater. I kind of like it as a representation of Art as Religion, and, of course, as a mockery of art collectors. He was running 3 studios full of assistants at full steam for 2 years to turn out all this work.
I took the photo on the right a couple of years ago. I think I didn't post it on flickr then because it was disturbing without being really powerful - kind of the opposite of my response to Francis Bacon. More like that childhood toy, the Visible Woman or the Visible Man, than anything that moved me.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:51 AM | Comments (2)
September 13, 2008
The 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon
Professor Soltan visits the 9/11 Memorial.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2008
Pentagon 9/11 Memorial
CNN has good coverage, including lots about the design of the memorial.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
Philippe de Montebello has it right - the Met has sold out
Has the Met has gone a-whoring after recent art?
In a phone interview, Mr. de Montebello praised Mr. Campbell’s appointment. “He’s the most modern of us all,” he said, invoking Met directors. “We’ve had a Romanist, a medievalist, but he goes up through the Baroque."
Actually, despite Mr. de Montebello's little joke, it's Carol Vogel in the New York Times article who regrets the modern and contemporary holdings in the Met. Soon-to-retire director de Montebello and new director Campbell don't say anything about the issue. If it even is an issue. I'm quite certain that the Met should not pursue cutting-edge contemporary art; show it if you like, but don't buy it. It's too hard to decide what's important and it's all too expensive.
Bloomberg's Linda Yablonsky has an interesting opinion piece about the selection, too. Speaking as a fellow 46-year-old, I'm amused she's calling Campbell 'youthful:'
Frankly, it seems fitting that a dark horse like the youthful Campbell should take the reins. In this U.S. presidential election year, inexperience seems anything but an obstacle to success. It might even be an asset, especially when the candidate comes with ideals, refined speech and a winning personality.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:56 AM | Comments (0)
September 9, 2008
Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate
Bacon's work was included in important U.S. collections during his lifetime. He never quite conquered New York where the dominant styles were first the abstraction of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, then the cool of Pop and Minimalism.His work, in contrast, was messily, sometimes squalidly, figurative. It was about subjects such as mortality, sex, and fear. New York critics often found it nasty and corny.
They had half a point. Bacon's work is a complex mixture. One of his aims was to make what he painted more real than any photograph could -- or as he put it in an interview with art critic David Sylvester, "to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly."
Bacon is maybe the best example - certainly MY favorite example - of art that is disturbing and great. Better than de Kooning, easily.
I'm still thinking, five years after seeing it for the first time, about Bacon's Oedipus and the Sphinx (after Ingres). Here's the Ingres painting. Gosh.
I don't like rawness and self-torture, but I don't really like tragedy, either. That doesn't mean we live in a non-tragic world.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:56 AM | Comments (1)
September 8, 2008
There's Stolen Art and there's LOST Art
A day after reports surfaced that Wellesley College's Davis Museum may have unintentionally thrown out a prized 1921 painting by French cubist Fernand Leger, President H. Kim Bottomly promised that new controls will be in place by October to better protect the museum's art.. . .
The Leger had been loaned to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art for an exhibit that ended in April 2007. The work was then sent back to Wellesley, where it sat in a crate for months before the museum checked and found it was missing.
It is unclear what happened to the oil painting, which measures 25 by 21 inches, but museum officials have speculated that it may not have been removed from the crate before that crate was discarded.
One supposes that "new controls" may include "a new director" and "a new conservator." Read it all.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)
September 5, 2008
How you can spot an economic downturn . . .
The Bloomberg.com:Muse headline link is: Fewer $25,000 Gala Tables This Summer as Hamptons Arts Groups Woo Donors
"With this economy, people are a little more hesitant to spend money,'' said Weisbrodt, creative director of the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation, which operates the Watermill Center, an artists' residency program. "You can certainly feel a different climate. Instead of buying a $25,000 table, they buy a $15,000 table.''. . .
"Watermill is a place where artists can create without the pressures of the market,'' said [Rufus] Wainwright, who performed new music he set to Shakespeare's sonnets for a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Isabella Rossellini. "It's the process that counts, and that's important to our society.''
Awwww. Poor artists, depending on patrons like that.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:27 PM | Comments (0)
September 4, 2008
Should Museums be Free?
Waldemar Januszczak is having second thoughts. He goes to the Imperial War Museum in London and finds a paid admission special exhibition on, of all things, James Bond.
So, I hope the question I want to ask here is predictable. It should be. It’s a damned obvious question: why is the Imperial War Museum celebrating James Bond, when Bond and his Aston Martin and his girls and his gadgets have nothing to do with the terrible realities of war, and when our young men are having their legs blown away in Afghanistan and Iraq? If the question is obvious, so, alas, is the answer. We all know exactly why the Imperial War Museum has put on a Bond show. It’s as clear as a vodka martini. Bond is popular and, by devoting a display to him, the organisers hope to attract wagonloads of fee-paying visitors to their museum. He’ll bring a younger crowd. The kidults will love him. Seats are sure to be settled with bums.. . .
There are, in fact, two tragedies being enacted here. One is the continuing collapse of cultural values that leaves us unable to tell the difference between Kylie’s dresses and the rightful terrain of a museum. The other is an unfortunate side effect of a well-meaning gesture - the abolition of museum charges. Making entry to national museums free, thereby reversing the policy of charging brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government, is the biggest feather in new Labour’s cultural cap. Having marched outside the V&A in the 1980s, protesting against museum charges, I was as delighted as anyone by the Blair government’s determination to push through free entry.
Seven years on from the abolition of charges, however, things are no longer so clear. When that dreadful old Etonian, the then shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire, popped up in the papers last year suggesting that the Conservatives might reexamine the free-admissions policy, large barrels of ordure came down on his head, persuading him to beat a hasty retreat. Yet the cruel truth is that free museum entry has turned out to be a mixed blessing. Yes, the number of visitors going to galleries has increased dramatically, but the figures are not what they seem. A Mori poll conducted in 2002 discovered that, although numbers had increased, the make-up of the typical museumgoer had remained unchanged. What was actually happening was that the same people were going more often. And those people were, as before, the middle-class, the educated, the culturally involved.
. . .
The most serious effect, however, of the scrapping of entrance fees has been the impact it has had on exhibition policy. Unable to charge visitors for entry, museums have had to rely on special exhibitions for large chunks of their income. The talented among them have duly found ways of putting on shows that are both popular and proper. The British Museum’s tribute to the Terracotta Army is a perfect example: the most successful show of the year, but ambitious, thoughtful, enlightening. Yet it takes a rare museum talent to pull off that approach. Which is why the Imperial War Museum has resorted to waving [Halle] Berry’s bikini at us.
[my emphasis]
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:11 AM | Comments (3)
September 2, 2008
Poster Sales Days
They set up folding tables across the front of the Scandling Center and sell posters the first days of the semester. I found this article about most popular posters amusing. Sadly, Dali's Persistence of Memory didn't make the list.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:09 PM | Comments (1)
Art News of the Ick
I just don't get the logistics of this deeply creepy art sale from the article. Follow the link if you like, but there's no picture.
Man sells his tattoo to German collector for €150,000A Swiss man has sold an elaborate Virgin Mary tattoo on his back to a German collector, with the understanding it can be exhibited three times yearly, a Zurich gallery said Monday.
But . . .
The extraordinary transaction - which gallery owner Jutta Nexdorf claims is the first of its kind - fetched €150,000 ($219,000), with the main stipulation being that the 35-hour work can be removed from the bearer’s skin upon death and handed to its owner.The owner will also be allowed to sell the tattoo, created by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. It is notable for depicting the mother of Jesus with a lifeless skull.
Proceeds from the sale are being shared among the gallery, tattoo bearer Tim Steiner and Delvoye, Nexdorf told AFP. The tattoo will go on show for the first time next week in Singapore and Shanghai.
So is the - um - current bearer of the tattoo on the verge of death? Or will he be flown to Singapore and Shanghai for exhibition and then appear thrice yearly until death, at which point the tattoo will be removed and may be resold?
And, sad to say, is this really the first time that tattoos have been collected? We've all seen horrific photos from the Nazi era. Perhaps the novelty is that the proceeds are being shared?
I understand the price - the artist is Wim Delvoye, big-name conceptual artist. If you follow the wikipedia link, you'll learn that he's been doing tattoos for some time (I hadn't read about those before). Here are some of his tattoos on pigs.
You'd think it would be easier, cheaper, and quicker (in the sense that the tattoo will be removed after death) to buy one of these; I suppose the collector wants human skin, though. Ick.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
Venice gets its first new bridge in 70 years
And of course, all kinds of people hate it. It's a Calatrava. It was too expensive. It isn't even accessible to the handicapped (and I'm not sure how they pulled that off!) Go read about it here.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2008
So did they sacrifice 100 oxen?
If not, I'm not impressed, and I doubt Athena would be, either. Hecatombs, people!
New Acropolis Museum Prompts Greek Pagan Service at Parthenon
The funniest part, though it might have suffered in translation, is this: "Moving these sculptures to a museum that is foreign and hostile to the Greek environment is like breaking up a family.''
No, moving the sculptures from exposure to the chemically-hostile Greek environment is the only thing that might save them!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM
August 30, 2008
What Candybar would Henry VIII Choose?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:11 AM | Comments (2)
August 22, 2008
And you thought stained glass was just pretty!
"For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realize that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst," said Zhu in a statement.
I think that "little did they realize" is about right, but still, this is an interesting suggestion about stained glass.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:58 PM
August 14, 2008
New Pocketable Camera Joy!
A PowerShot SD870 IS (don't all those elements connote sophistication?). This will fit more slimly in my pockets - the tradeoff of the A530's use of over-the-counter batteries was the big bulge; of course, it also made it easy to handle. We'll see.
Once again I read around, but came back to Ken Rockwell's recommended list and ordered there - might as well support someone who is so very, very informative! Go there and do likewise.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:59 PM | Comments (2)
The Old Pocketable Camera
My PowerShot A530 is still working fine - but the slide to switch from shoot to replay broke off - luckily in the shoot position! Time for a new camera!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2008
That rare bird, the collector of stolen art?
Whenever a major work of art is stolen people wonder if a reclusive billionaire is sending out minions to add to his collection. Somehow that notion usually gets dismissed - especially when stolen famous art turns up later and it appears the criminals were unable to move it on any market.
Here's an example to test the rule from the New York Times.
The curious case of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, a threadbare eccentric and an amateur genealogist of the Upper East Side, began in the summer of 2006, when, a few months after he died (at the age of either 58 or 62), it was discovered that his birth name was Melvyn Kohn, that he resided not on Fifth Avenue but in a small apartment on East 72nd Street, and that he had not — counter to his claims — attended Groton or Harvard, nor had he once been married to a French royal.He left no will, and the apartment turned out to be full of artworks — including a bust by Giacometti that has since been valued at $900,000 to $1.2 million and a small painting by Giorgio Morandi that would eventually be auctioned for about $600,000 — that turned out to be stolen. (The Morandi was subsequently returned to the care of the Manhattan public administrator, who oversees legal details for the intestate.)
Some of the art in Mr. Kingsland’s collection does appear to have belonged, in the legal sense of the word, to him. But the F.B.I., brought in to sort through the trove, discovered that of the more than 300 pieces found in his apartment, — including stolen works by Picasso, Copley, Fairfield Porter and Odilon Redon — most anything of commercial significance was difficult, at best, to verify as his.
Mr. Kingsland doesn't seem to have been a Napoleon of Crime, Stolen Art Division, but it's a good story. I don't know that they'll ever work it out - he didn't leave much paper trail. On a guess, he seems to have been willing to buy things that weren't well-documented.
Follow the link and watch the slide show - maybe you own one of these?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:33 AM | Comments (0)
August 7, 2008
More typography
The Ampersand, a weblog.
via Daring Fireball
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
August 5, 2008
Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
It wouldn't be a trip to visit my sister and her crew if I didn't get to the National Gallery! Mother wanted to see a show sponsored by the National Geographic Society called Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. You can tell it was a National Geographic show because there were so many WORDS in the free brochure - available for download in PDF format! Click and see all the pictures I'm talking about. I've ordered the catalog, but it was way too heavy to lug back to NoVa on the Metro.
The show concentrates on the ancient gold work that was quietly preserved through the Soviet and Taliban eras of Afghanistan by being locked in safes in the cellars of the presidential palace; there was some fun video of a very excited crowd of Afghan museum folks cutting open the safes and taking the stuff out of boxes. This is framed by gutwrenching scenes of boxes of shattered stone sculptures, each topped with what looks like a xerox of a pre-revolutionary catalog page for future reference. A former director of the museum explains that this destruction was intentional - not related to the (accidental?) shelling of the museum during the Soviet invasion.
The show has a lot of individual objects, but it really isn't all that big, because those objects are ensembles. There are some stunning ivory plaques which originally decorated wooden furniture and there are the grave goods from 5 graves - if you add up all the little things in the show you might get into the low thousands, but 100 gold appliqué beads = 1 thing for me.
The material is all from Bactria, the northern rim of Afghanistan and the area eternally involved in East-West trade along the Silk Route. There were a few objects from around 2000 BC that show obvious Mesopotamian iconographical influence - if not actually Mesopotamian manufacture. One was a gold cup with repoussé bulls - bearded bulls like the harp box at Ur.
Then we leap to about 300 BC - yup, not a lot of supporting information there - but the treatment of a city founded by Alexander the Great was really splendid. The site was excavated after King Zahir Shah was shown a limestone Corinthian capital while on a hunting trip in 1961 and told someone to go explore the area. There was a brilliant 3-d walk through of a reconstruction of the city and palace. The remains were very, very Greek, as one would expect - including things like dedicatory statues of a gymnasiarch and torsos of beautiful youths. There was a splendid gilded silver plate with Cybele entering a city - great fun!
All of my favorite items in the show came from the city of Begram, a city that grew rich from Silk Road trade. The huge photographic mural of the ramparts was awe-inspiring - I'm sure merchants were glad to get there. The material from Begram was preserved in a mysterious accident - it was all found in two adjacent rooms sealed in antiquity. Since they seem to be much of the same era they might represent a store of trade goods. There were two or three rather normal glass beakers, Roman, with remarkable painted surfaces. I've really never seen anything quite like them - the paintings are very much like the style of late Antique manuscript painting. I don't think I've ever seen painted Roman glass.
The ivory furniture panels were also found in the Begram rooms. They may well have been manufactured in north India, not only because of the material but also because of the iconography. The carving was wonderful - lively, erotic, fun! The wall text suggested that the chair was for a woman or for women's quarters or some such. Their reconstruction of the original piece as a large, backed bench used all the parts and was pretty convincing.
Most of the gold (and let's face it, that's always the big marketing point) was from a find of 5 graves - one male grave and 4 female graves circling it. The reconstructions of the original clothing were interesting, but the gold was splendid. And there was a lot of it! The most gorgeous piece is definitely the one on the cover of the brochure - one of a pair of hat pendants showing a man (divine or royal?) dominating two dragons.
my verdict: Beautiful stuff, but not enough to be worth a trip from outside the metro area. If you're already here, go.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:50 AM
August 2, 2008
Rome to tear down part of the Ara Pacis Shell
The new Richard Meier setting for the Altar of Peace of Augustus has been controversial from the beginning, but the new government of Rome is going to tear down a travertine wall that is blocking the view of two churches from the Lungotevere. Hmm. Click on the picture and you can see two walls - I think it's one of these: either the long horizontal (which carries water to the pool below) or the vertical flanking the door.
The article, from Bloomberg/Muse, is pretty stubby. I'll try to find out some more from Corriere della sera online.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:16 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2008
The things museum directors will do to bring art to the people.
Remember the note about Duran Duran playing a fundraiser for Friends of the Louvre?
Here's a description of the day's events from a BusinessWeek article:
On a breezy June morning, several dozen people climb a narrow staircase to an ornate, high-ceilinged room in the Louvre Museum. Displayed on easels are 22 works by Leonardo da Vinci—a delicate pen-and-ink Madonna and child, detailed architectural sketches, subtly shaded tempera studies of draped fabric. These fragile 500-year-old drawings are rarely seen by anyone but scholars and museum curators.Today, they've been removed from the vaults for a private showing to Friends of the Louvre, an elite group of $10,000-and-up donors. Later, the Friends will dine on veal and asparagus in truffle sauce amid Greek and Roman sculpture in the museum. Still later: a silent auction of luxury vacations and other indulgences and a concert by the '80s band Duran Duran. All told, the soiree will raise more than $2.7 million.
And you want to know why? The government's appropriations for the Louvre only cover half the budget, down from 70% in 2001. So an enterprising director looks to Duran Duran and Abu Dhabi . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:24 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2008
Opening the Hadrian Show in London
There's a big Hadrian show at the British Museum - and here's a description of the opening from Bloomberg Muse:
For the first time in many years, the ruler of London addressed the assembled populus in Latin. Boris Johnson, mayor of the U.K. capital, climbed onto the podium at the opening of the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition and began spouting classical prose.After awhile, he paused to ask the audience, ``How much more of this do you want? There's yards of it.'' The July 23 audience didn't demur, and perhaps some of them understood what he was saying since there were several professors of classical studies present.
So the mayor plunged on. He is himself, as Neil McGregor, director of the museum, pointed out, the ruler of a vast empire, namely the London government machine.
It was an impressive performance. Tony Blair is able to speak in passable French; President John F. Kennedy famously declared "Ich bin ein Berliner'' in German. But most British officials nowadays probably no longer have a working knowledge of Latin.
It may be that this was the best Latin speech made by a British politician since the Romans departed in the fifth century. Mayor Johnson studied Greats -- a four-year program in classics -- at Oxford, and is evidently a master of the Latin language. MacGregor, thanking the Italian ambassador for his help, described him as "the representative of the former colonial power.''
Here's a review of the show, as opposed to a love letter to Boris Johnson, from the 24 Hour Museum. It's getting great reviews; maybe because I'm just back from Rome I'm not all that thrilled - but they'll have things on show from all over the place. Still, they can't bring the Pantheon - and all the portrait busts in the world can't make up for that.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:01 AM
July 23, 2008
Font convention
And how conventional all the fonts are! Click and laugh, if you're a little font-obsessed. I'll admit that I, too, have dismissed Ransom.
via Daring Fireball
Funny funny - but for me especially timely - I'm about finished with Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, a book from which I've learned more new things that anything else I've read this summer. Gosh, it's good - I understand typography and book composition much better now, and could have learned even more if I'd applied myself.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:29 AM | Comments (1)
July 18, 2008
Windows on Chicago
"When you go into a windowless room, it's exhausting,'' said [Chicago Art Institute] museum president James Cuno. "Light nourishes.''Not usually for sensitive artworks, though. The windows will be equipped with translucent UV-filtering scrims -- shadelike shields strong enough to protect the pieces but thin enough to give museum-goers a hazy but discernable reading of Millennium Park's soaring Pritzker Pavilion. At night, the screens can be adjusted to reveal the sparkle of the lakefront skyscrapers.
A second set of scrims are opaque, allowing the museum to "black out" the galleries when the museum is closed.
Just how much natural light will be allowed through the windows and skylights is based on a formula called a "cumulative exposure calculation," said museum spokeswoman Erin Hogan.
The allowance varies greatly depending on the medium, said Hogan. Prints, drawings, and photography are very light sensitive. Paintings generally have a higher light tolerance, and sculptures even higher still.
. . .
The 264,000-square-foot wing will increase the Art Institute's exhibit space by about a third. Cuno said the museum's current collection of contemporary art, plus commissioned temporary exhibits, will be enough to fill the space.With creations by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, "we have lots of stuff,'' said Cuno.
"The problem is we didn't have enough space to show it all,'' he said.
There are two really good reasons for windowless museums - to protect art (yes, yes, museums ARE treasure-houses of art and libraries ARE treasure-houses of books -- get over it) and to show it. Walls of glass cut into hanging space in a BIG way, leaving the galleries less useful. So good museum designers -- and goodness knows Renzo Piano is a great museum designer -- use windows sparingly.
Cuno ends by listing a bunch of 2-d guys (yes, they did 3-d, too). But the estimate that the new wing at Chicago increases the space of the museum by a third doesn't mean it increases the amount of 2-d exhibition wall-space by a third.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:16 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2008
The auctioneer says 'buy, it'll go up 20% a year!'
Auctions on cruise ships? Who knew?
When most people think of art auctions, they think of Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York or London, not a cruise ship. But over the last two decades, auctioning “fine art” on cruises, often to first-time bidders who have never met a reserve or inspected a provenance, has become big business.Which leads to unhappy first-time auction winners:
“It was very upsetting,” Mr. Maldonado said. “I’m not mad about spending $73,000. I’m mad about spending $73,000 for works that I was told are worth more than $100,000 and are probably worth $10,000, if they’re even real.”Of course, even I, ignorant medievalist that I am, have been telling students for years not to buy Dalí prints because they're widely faked.
But read the whole thing - it's quite a good story!
via Tyler Cowen, whose price point without research is $1500. I have a simpler formula - cruises are for suckers.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (1)
July 15, 2008
A British Judge tries to explain private property to a graffiti practitioner
Judge Christopher Hardy said: “It would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that some examples of your handiwork show considerable artistic talent, part of what is now known as the graffiti subculture and on the way to being recognised as a valid form of art. The trouble is that it is has been sprayed all over other people’s property without their consent and that is simply vandalism.”
via Times Online
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:08 AM
July 12, 2008
Motion photography
I don't think I'm cut out to be a sports photographer - and I don't have the lenses - but a few of my pictures of the Musselman* ITU PanAmerican Cup didn't turn out too badly. Click on this one and see the others if you like.
Today's big race actually used my street as their turning point - brick-paved bumpiness must've been fun on those highly tuned bikes!
*It's Musselman, not Muscle Man, because of the Zebra Mussels in Seneca Lake.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:55 PM
July 11, 2008
The Handwriting of Typographers
Have you ever wondered about the handwriting of individual typographers? It hadn't occurred to me - but go look at these examples!
via John Gruber.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 AM
The FIRST major Isamu Noguchi show in England
The Times Online story says "in Europe," though they remind us that Noguchi represented America at a Venice Biennale in 1986. Surely that was a major show? Oh, well, quibbling aside, this will be a big retrospective, and the article about "America's Henry Moore" is interesting - and there's a good slide show attached. If you're not sure who I'm talking about, you know his coffee table. That's a kind of artistic immortality very few sculptors attain.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:28 AM
July 10, 2008
LACMA buys a collection of Oceanic Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has bought a sizeable collection - 46 pieces - of Oceanic Art. Evidently, according to an AP story, LACMA didn't have an Oceanic collection and felt the gap was significant (no link - who knows where their anti-blogger policy is going?). The Detroit Institute of Art is a little disappointed - the collection was assembled on behalf of a Michigan foundation and was exhibited at the DIA at least once.
In an oddly condescending move for a modern museum, the AP story indicates that they intend to exhibit the materials with the modern art because of the influences on 20th century European art. The LA Times story is less explicit, but quotes the LACMA director:
Govan also noted the significant influence of the types of works in the collection on modern and contemporary artists, including Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Max Ernst and others."They're so accessible, even in a modern age. It's the sheer power of the items that you don't see in any other culture," he said. "The dance paddle is a sensual, abstract object that has that sort of power to it. And they are not important just because of their influence on European artists. They are an alternate aesthetic and should be seen that way.
But if you're exhibiting them that way . . . ?
The LA Times coverage has a photo of an stunning statue from Easter Island - wood with what looks like a bone eye and an obsidian iris (materials listed in the caption). Really - go look. I'd like to know the scale of the head, too, but the lines are amazing.
That head doesn't remind me of 20th, but of 12th Century French sculpture - think of Autun or Vezelay!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:28 AM
July 9, 2008
Ooooh - BIG Byzantine Blockbuster
The Royal Academy of Arts mounts a blockbuster show (300 pieces!) of Byzantine art this fall - and it comes from all over. If you follow the link the pictures are disappointingly small, but give you some idea. The story leads with the typical conspiracy theory that the Antioch Chalice was the Holy Grail - but hey, if it gets 'em out. . . .
This link to the RAs exhibition page is much more satisfying.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM
June 10, 2008
Duran Duran plays a fundraiser at the Louvre
The dinner is part of a series of events sponsored by the American Friends of the Louvre, a U.S. nonprofit organization set up in December 2002 to help the museum fund renovations and build ties with U.S. counterparts. AFL has pledged $4 million toward the Louvre's 18th-century decorative-arts galleries, and it already has raised $550,000."The fact that the Louvre is seeking outside patronage doesn't bother me. It depends what the patrons are getting in exchange,'' said Didier Rykner, an art historian whose Internet site La Tribune de l'Art (English version: http://www.thearttribune.com) has been a vocal critic of the Louvre's Atlanta and Abu Dhabi ventures. "If it's a gala dinner with Duran Duran playing underneath the pyramid, that's fine.''
I wonder how he means that? Is the pyramid a piece of 80s nostalgia, like a Duran Duran concert?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:03 AM
June 9, 2008
North British Palladianism, anyone?
One of the great ensemble museums of the 18th century has just opened - most of the furniture designed for the house, the paintings built up as an organic collection; it's not exactly on the beaten track, but it really would be something to see!
From the Bloomberg.com story:
Dumfries House in Scotland admitted its first paying visitors at the weekend. It was opened by the Prince of Wales, who saved it for the nation last year by backing a 45-million-pound ($88.4 million) rescue package.Dumfries is an extraordinarily intact and beautiful country property, designed and built between 1754 and 1759 by the architect brothers John and Robert Adam for the Earls of Dumfries, who later became Marquesses of Bute. It stands in landscaped grounds of 2,070 acres (840 hectares) and has a collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture designed for its rooms.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
June 3, 2008
Technology on the March - Looking at Art Online
Over at Cronaca I read about an exhibition at the Morgan Library of a new acquisition of theirs, an early 16th century French prayer book (the Prayer Book of Claude de France). The manuscript is too late to be of much real interest to me (we all have our preferences, and a strong one of mine is for earlier art), but the online viewer he linked to is amazing! Just shows what money and thought can do - this is the best online viewer for books that I've used lately!
Go look!
By the way - total coolness! The donor's bookplate is still in the book; after all, it's a Picasso! The Morgan wouldn't go peeling that out, even for conservation purposes. Just look at the juxtaposition of interiors and exteriors - Picasso's sketchy little window looking onto a landscape (with the owner's initials worked into something that recalls a wrought iron balustrade) and the Claude Master's tricky little framed view of John on Patmos toying with space and illusionism. Fun!
Now having looked at that, go look at some of their other online exhibitions.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 AM
May 27, 2008
Oddly Sweet
Here's the New York Times obituary for Sydney Pollack. It was almost always worth watching his movies. Interesting, though - he married in 1958 and stayed married to the same woman. Oddly sweet when you see that in a Hollywood type, somehow.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2008
The Milan Galleria
So also on the Piazza del Duomo in MIlano is a temple to commerce, the Galleria. Much as I love this space - the first covered mall in modern history (though the ancient Romans did it much earlier) the art historian in me flashes to Boccioni's Riot in the Galleria, one of the great Futurist paintings lusting for modernity through violence, the kind of lust that got him killed in a training accident in WWI. Still, the Galleria is an amazing spatial experience. And Boccioni was a first rate artist.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:42 AM | Comments (1)
April 23, 2008
Mosaic from Milan - what IS this?
I spent the weekend in Milan and Venice, but the most excitingly odd art was the first I saw - a mosaic in the train station. I have no idea what this picture is about. Tarzan and Jane are shouting as they ride a raft with a dead and eviscerated moose?
Milan photoset.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:26 AM
April 18, 2008
The Horrible Yalie Story
Professor Soltan looks at the artist's statement. That's a genre that could use a lot of help anyway - this example is sadly characteristic.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:23 PM
April 17, 2008
So what am I doing with free time in Rome?
Mosaic-hopping, of course! This are the inscription and lamb bands at Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere - about all that's left of the 9th C church (yes, another Pascal I building like Sta Prassede and Sta Maria in Domnica). The knee is somewhat better, so trudging around Trastevere wasn't too bad. This morning I'm off to Saint Lawrence outside the walls - long bus ride, but not much walking.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM
April 11, 2008
Then in the afternoon . . .
Did I mention my knee is more achy yesterday than today? Well, in the afternoon I made the mistake of going out again instead of sitting quietly at home. At least I saw a great church - the only Nordic Gothic Revival church that I know of in Rome, Sacro Cuore del Suffragio in Prati (I've blogged about it before - go here for an exterior detail of the West window). The site of the Vicariate of Rome suggests that the church was established in 1890 - that's the best date I can find.
The interior lived up to expectation. And in the Sacristy, the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory! They have a number of things like prayer books and night caps showing scorch marks from fingers of souls returning from the fires of Purgatory to ask for Masses to be said - or reproaching relatives for not having the Masses said that the suffering soul provided for in his or her will! Great stuff.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:55 PM
My aching knee . . . Churchgoing
I overdid it a little yesterday and am paying the price today. Luckily, the Italian pharmacy system is happy to refill American prescriptions, and I brought an anti-inflammatory for the gout. For euro 1.45 I got 25 capsules - enough for a run at reducing the swelling.
So yesterday I hit the Celian Hill (by bus! The 81 runs from Largo Argentina right to via Navicella), looked at the aqueduct remains, Sta Maria in Domnica, and Santo Stefano Rotondo. Unfortunately, the Mithraeum under the last church is only open on 4th Saturdays - so I'll try to make it back then.
The apse mosaic it Sta Maria in Domnica is one of my favorites in Rome. It shows Pope Paschal I (817-824) holding the foot of the Virgin, who is enthroned with the Christ Child and surrounded by a heavenly court of angels. The inscription is remarkably fine.
Paschal also built or rebuilt Sta Prassede and Sta Cecilia in Trastevere - and the apse mosaics at least survive at those two churches as well.
So here's the core of Santo Stefano Rotondo. The Corinthian columns support a 12th Century structural intervention - a diaphragm wall that ends up being strangely beautiful in the space, even though it cuts the cylinder in half. The Ionic rotunda is late 5th C - spolia columns but with freshly-carved capitals and entablature. Santo Stefano is a strange church - much reduced from its original circumference, but still beautiful. The main exedra with its 7th C apse showing two military saints is unfortunately for me very much in restauro; I wanted to look at it up close to compare it to the 9th C mosaics made for Paschal's churches.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:31 PM
April 10, 2008
The finds never stop - but Metropolitana construction does
Yet another halt to a Metro C dig while they deal with a pretty big chunk of equestrian sculpture found under the pavement around the Colosseum. They're thinking it might be an emperor.
Here's the Sopritendenza Archaeologica di Roma's take on the project - clickable!
via Archaeology in Europe. I haven't bought a Roman newspaper this week.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:40 PM
April 7, 2008
Book list for Layers of Rome
A commenter asked for the book list - and I realized that I hadn't put one up! I thought I had done so back in December when we were packing to come to Rome. Here it is below.
Next time I'll bit the bullet and use Krautheimer for the second half - it's back in print and it's not expensive. It's a fun book, but not really organized in a way that I find useful. The reproductions are not very well-produced, either. Claridge is a great thing for my class - readable, filled with information but not too full, and lots of good drawings instead of bad photos. The maps could use some work.
Claridge, Amanda. Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide Oxford University Press, USA, 1998. [great book!]
Any textbook of Roman Art:
Wheeler, Mortimer. Roman Art and Architecture. Thames & Hudson, 1985. [most of them bought this - very inexpensive]
Ramage & Ramage, Roman Art
Kleiner, Fred, A History of Roman Art [I had used this recently as the textbook for a course - one student had taken the course and had this book - very useful but quite expensive.]
- - - - - -
Mathews, Thomas F. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton University Press; Rev edition, 1999.
ANY edition or translation of the Bible
Lots of duplicated readings, to be distributed in Rome. [I made less use of these than in the 2003 version of the course - this was almost all primary source excerpts printed off the Internet Medieval Sourcebook and its ancient sourcebook sibling.
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED
Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308. Princeton Univ Press, 2000 [Next time I'll try to use this as a textbook.]
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM
April 5, 2008
Art stolen a while back - 1902
The Grand Rapids Art Museum is repatriating two panels stolen from a church in Abruzzo in 1902. Everyone is very congratulatory, but there's something a bit off:
Laurence Kanter, a leading scholar of Italian Renaissance Art in America, is the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of Early European Art at Yale University and former Curator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He commented on the repatriation, “The action of the Grand Rapids Art Museum is commendable. These panels will have far greater meaning and importance in the context of their home region than they would in any international museum setting. The Italian scholars dedicated to this worthy project can now take a significant step toward realizing their goal.”. . .
The Saint Eustace panels will be on view at the Grand Rapids Art Museum from April 8 through May 4 before their return to Italy to Il Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo (The National Museum of Abruzzo).
(My emphases)
You see, they're not returning them to the church of Saint Eustace in Campo di Giove, Abruzzo, whence they were stolen in 1902, but to a museum in Aquila, the provincial capital. The art has been nationalized and denaturized. Yes, it will be nice that they're in Abruzzo, but there don't even seem to be any other pieces of the stolen altarpiece there with which to reunite them.
This is like the question of where the objects looted from Etruscan graves and sold to museums like the Met and the Boston MFA will end up. The Sarpedon Krater is going to the Villa Giulia in Rome, I've read. I'm not in favor of American museums keeping stolen goods, but it's worth remembering that an object stolen from a church is to be given to the state.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
April 4, 2008
They've begun!
Final presentations began yesterday (Thursday) - and late this afternoon I'll be half-way through them!
I've divided the students into groups of 4 or 5 based on easy itinteraries (sometime that means a metro ride, but hey, we all have passes). Yesterday's group did (1) the Imperial fora and Mussolini's creation of a propaganda-rich, if archaeologically-problematic avenue across them; (2) the Piazza Venezia from its initiation through the Victor Emmanuel intervention and the fascist era, complete with Mussolini's balcony; (3) San Marco, from early Christian to 18th century changes; and the Markets and Forum of Trajan.
Everyone did quite a creditable job - we're off to a good start!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM | Comments (0)
April 1, 2008
The B-52s know my pain
I ain't no student
of ancient culture
before I talk
I should read a book!
But there's one thing
that I do know
There's a lot of ruins
in Meso-Po-Tamia!
Would that everyone read the book before they talked! And/or, that they all dressed like Fred did in the 80s. That would help my mood.
Please note that I am posting this BEFORE final presentations start, so none of my immediate students are individually implicated - yet.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)
March 30, 2008
Free museums
Yow! My feet hurt!
This is the Settimana della cultura, the week of culture, an annual extravaganza of free museums. I hit 3 today - the Palazzo Venezia, the Cripta Balbi, and the Forum/Palatine. I couldn't get into the House of Augustus - maybe tomorrow. Yesterday, Pal Massimo al Terme (another visit to the Pompeian paintings) and two temporary shows at the Palazzo della Esposizione.
This event is aimed at internal tourism, so it comes up almost unannounced - no one seemed ready for it (though I'm sure the museums were). I've been running around like crazy all week, and tomorrow I'm only taking some of a break because it's Monday (so museums will be closed, though archaeological sites are open) and because we're having a team-grading event, my colleague and I. The semester is drawing to a close for us!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2008
Resurrexit
So here in Rome it's already Sunday, and He's risen. Yay!
They baptized two babies at the Oratory - and that was quite enough! For a recessional the organist broke into the "Hallelujah Chorus." I suppose I was the only person in the building who knew all the words in the original, for once.
For the more visual than aural among us, I offer Piero della Francesca's version - the greatest of all Renaissance resurrections. If you don't believe me just click and enlarge.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:33 AM | Comments (2)
March 20, 2008
Sebastiano del Piombo exhibition
Yesterday I made it, finally, to the Sebastiano del Piombo show at the Palazzo Venezia. His painting best known in America (and actually in America) is the Christopher Columbus portrait at the Met (strange, the linked image is black'n'white). Sebastiano was indeed an amazing portraitist, and the portraits were the highlight of the show, however much the curators wanted us to look at some other works. A friend of Michelangelo and a rival of Raphael, Sebastiano did well as a portraitist and well-enough as a chatter-up of his papal sitters to be named keeper of the papal seal - il piombo, and hence, del Piombo. Portraitists had to spend a good bit of time with their sitters, and it shouldn't surprise us that personable artists like van Eyck, van Dyck, and Sebastiano del Piombo did well.
The exhibition space was splendid and dim - and a little strange. They had installed a wall covered with a velvety fabric. The paintings were hung about two feet behind this wall surface, framed by a window. The lighting was VERY dim in the gallery, though the paintings themselves were well-lit by lamps concealed in the false wall. It's hard to describe, but it was effective - certainly not a white wall with paintings jostling each other! There were about 20 drawings on display as well - I didn't spot any studies for paintings that were also on display, but I didn't linger long - that room was the only one that felt particularly crowded.
Sebastiano experimented with painting on slate instead of on canvas or wood panel - and in at least two of those paintings on show he used the color of the slate to leave figures floating in a kind of darkness - the head of Clement VII looked amazing that way.
My favorite comparison was stepping back and forth between the Met Columbus and the portrait of Andrea Doria. The great papal admiral made a much more interesting subject - the deep shadow and his gesture towards the piece of classical carving in front of him almost demands interpretation - and I don't know how to read it. Very disquieting.
My favorite portrait was the similarly ambiguous "Portrait of a Man in Armor," completed in 1512. You can find it on the slide show linked below - the Wadsworth Athenaeum owns it, but I can't find a version of it on their site. Sebastiano was fond of the quarter view - the sitter with a turned head - but this one is exaggerated in its playfulness. At least I found the figure playful. All in all, a good show!
Here's a review in the International Herald Tribune with a useful slide show.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:58 AM
March 19, 2008
Class prep + Holy Week = Credit towards Heaven?
Bring on the Doctrine of Works - I'm having a good week!
So I'm previewing my favorite mosaics on the Quirinal Hill this afternoon for class tomorrow - I run by Santa Pudenziana, check on Santa Prassede, and hit Santa Maria Maggiore last - and just in time for the Wednesday after Palm Sunday Stational Mass with Penitential Procession. The presiding bishop was a little frighteningly doddery - I saw him holding his chest at one point while the procession was coming back up the aisle, and I'm not sure he was clutching his pectoral cross. The music was splendid - the kind of thing that having a college of canons can do for you! I made use of one of the Dominicans in the college of confessors, too, while I was at it. Is there a plenary indulgence on offer here? Readers?
I've told my students that unless they really want the vast sea of devotion thing they should evade St. Peter's this week and go to the other great basilicas - especially for the Easter Vigil. For the Easter Vigil myself I'm torn between going to Sta Prassede, as I did in 2003 (when, to be sure, it was within easy walking distance of my apartment) and going next door to Chiesa Nuova. I'm really not much of a church hopper when it comes to mass - I tend to go to the same place over and over anyway. Living next door to Chiesa Nuova has been very nice!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:54 PM
March 18, 2008
How do you give a final exam in Rome? Let them do the talking!
Here's the assignment for the final exam:
Choose a well-layered site - a single building or a area of the city - no more than 10 minutes of walking time. You should not choose a site or building we have visited together in any detail - hence the major monuments we have discussed and everything from the midterm is off limits. You don't have to avoid the same themes, however. All sites must be approved by me.
Prepare a 25-30 minute presentation for me and a group of your colleagues. You are not, unlike the midterm, just talking to me! Part of your grade will be determined by how well you communicate your site to people who haven't studied it. When we head out for presentations, your engagement in others' talks also counts. Do you pay attention? Do you ask meaningful questions of your colleagues?
Your site should show layers from at least 2 of the 4 broad period divisions below and should have at least one more - if the ancient layer is now invisible because of being built over, you might show us drawings or diagrams. Holding up the textbook is BARELY sufficient, but will not be penalized. That is to say, if your site shows 4 layers, GREAT! But if your site shows only layers from 2 periods but had others which you can convey to us, fine.
*ancient
------------------------------
*medieval - before 1000
*medieval - after 1000
------------------------------
*renaissance - eh, 1350-1600
*baroque/rococo - 1600-1800
------------------------------
*Unification - 1800-1920
*Fascist - 1920-1944
*Contemporary - 1945-now
You will deliver these presentations in groups of 4 or 5. We will begin Thursday, April 3, during the regular Layers time slot. I have no idea yet how long it will take or exactly how many groups we will have - I am leaving that decision until you have chosen sites.
Here's the list of sites they've chosen* - there is some duplication; because we will be going out in groups of 4 or 5 that won't be a problem.
Piazza Navona
Piazza del Popolo
Piazza Venezia
Santa Cecilia
Ss Cosmas and Damian
San Giovanni a Laterano (basilica)
San Lorenzo in Damaso
San Marco, Piazza Venezia
Sta Maria degli Angeli, esp as architecture
Sta Maria degli Angeli, esp as remodeled Baths
Santa Maria Sopra Minerva
Theater of Marcellus, esp Fascist phase of the neighborhood
Forum of Trajan
Horti Sallustiani (Quirinal Hill)
Palatine / Augustus
Trajan's Market
Castel Sant'Angelo
Bridges
Obelisks
Porta Pia
Protestant Cemetary (Pyramid, too??)
Tiber Island
*well, most of them chose. At the end there I had to pass out assignments to four or six people. But now they have two full weeks to prepare!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:05 PM
March 13, 2008
Sabina - the best day-trip ever!
We had splendid weather today for a trip to Sabina - after a week of showers and dicey grey skies we met a bus at Termini and headed north.
By happenstance (sheer small worldism) my colleague Nick Ruth met Nicole Franchini, an alumna of William Smith College (the female half of the Hobart and William Smith coordinate system). Nicole has lived in Italy for more than 20 years, most recently in Rome. She and her family also have a house in the Sabine Hills.
Nicole arranged our trip today - and maybe even the weather!
We started at Farfa, one of the great imperial abbeys of medieval Italy - think of the abbey in The Name of the Rose but a little further south in the peninsula. One of the two Carolingian towers survives with a a bit of the Westwork beside it (and a chunk of painted wall - go look at the pictures on Flickr!). The body of the current church is later and perpendicular to the Carolingian building.
We had a good tour of Farfa and then headed on to Casperia, an incredibly beautiful hill town. There were other incredibly beautiful hill towns within sight, as was Mount Soracte, beloved of Horace, who seems to have had a view of it from his Sabine Farm.
Nicole had arranged a buffet luncheon on a terrace / piazza, then dessert and coffee at the house of the restaurant owners afterwards. We wandered around town for a little while, then back to Rome. The students seemed happy in a stunned-by-the-beauty kind of way. I certainly enjoyed myself!
We have to turn our story in to the Pulteney Street Survey, these Colleges' alumnae/i magazine!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:17 PM
Historic Photos on Flickr
Notre Dame's Architecture Library has (or maybe 'is in the process of'?) uploading scans of its lantern slides - and they're all under a Creative Commons license!
This one shows the Pons Fabricius, the foot bridge to Tiber Island, with an INCREDIBLE load of silt - perhaps in the aftermath of the 1870 flood? I'm not sure. Here's my photo from this spring of the same bridge - taken from a slightly different point of view.
Amazing photos! Over 600 for Italy alone! Lantern slides were amazingly high quality black and white medium format glass slides, and nothing is much better for showing architecture. Given the collection there are few scenes of everyday life except those in the foreground of buildings and there's an obvious western European bias, but this is a real resource - 2,714 reasonably high quality photos in the public domain of the world before World War I. Thank you, Notre Dame!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:59 AM
March 11, 2008
Sta Maria Maggiore - the apse
I decided to run up and see some of the mosaics I love in Rome. I knew that the Ravennate work was great, but the immediate comparison was really noticeable for the Torriti apse at Sta. Maria Maggiore. His composition really suffers - all that scrolling vine work above Christ and the Virgin with the standing folks below just doesn't hang together as well.
Sta. Prassede didn't disappoint, though - the color fields there are so strong! I'll have to borrow a tripod and take some decent shots there.
Because of the travel and the recent weather this was my first clear afternoon in awhile to run look at something - but it started sprinkling when I came out of Sta Prassede, so I didn't hang around. Seems clear now. We're having a very showery March here in Rome!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:44 PM
March 10, 2008
Serendipity, Exegetical style
Just as I sit down to grade the Bible exercises for my layers class Google News turns up a book review for me Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, edited and translated by Robert Louis Wilken. The somewhat hostile review notes:
The production of these works [this new series] is essentially a historical exercise, perhaps with the editors operating according to the conviction that biblical interpretation is too important to be left to exegetes, especially critical and postcritical exegetes. The offer of an early Christian reading of the book of Isaiah is especially to the point of the new series, for Isaiah—more than any other Old Testament book—lends itself to a christological reading, so much so that the early church referred to it as the "fifth Gospel." The assumption of the series, surely correct, is that the church has much to learn from the history of interpretation in the early period before church interpretation engaged historical criticism, which exhibited the problems in the text and began to distance the text from the claims of the gospel. My emphases.In my case, it's not that interpretation is too important to be left to the exegetes, but that critical and postcritical readings of the Bible are pretty much useless for understanding art that draws on the Bible. In contrast, while we were at San Vitale in Ravenna this weekend, my students all understood not only WHICH scene showed the Sacrifice of Isaac but also understood WHY it is adjacent to the altar. That is to say, why Christians saw the sacrifice of Isaac as a foreshadowing, a type, of the crucifixion of Jesus, even in the episodes that weren't depicted!
In case you haven't read Genesis lately, let me remind you that Abraham and Isaac and the servant journey for 3 days to the mountain. Isaac carries the wood for burning the sacrifice on his own shoulders - those are two elements that are never, or almost never, depicted, though they bring the parallel into sharper focus than just saying Abraham:Isaac::God:Jesus. Earlier viewers, of course, knew the whole story.
One of my difficulties is selecting passages that like this one are brief enough to read quickly, obvious enough that students can work out the parallels the Early Christians saw without having to do a lot of following up cross references, and (most important for my purpose) have important visual traditions. As an example of something I can't do much with you can think about the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes; while they're vital for understanding all sorts of stuff about Christianity they have very little importance in the visual tradition. Talking doesn't make a great picture.
Here's an entry from a good while back on the same subject.
Pitiful to say, I'm blogging with someone else's picture of the Sacrifice of Isaac - my interiors at San Vitale were not very good.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:52 AM
March 6, 2008
Meet the blogger...
I also met a blogger today - something that I, who usually live in scenic Geneva, NY, seldom do.
Zadok the Roman invited me to meet him outside the Cancelleria, where he had a class this afternoon. We got caffé, then he showed me the Sala Riario (named after the cardinal who built the palazzo) and the Sala dei Cento Giorni, painted by Giorgio Vasari.
I had never been further than the Bramante courtyard. Here's the best picture I can find on the web of the Sala dei Cento Giorni, which is as good an answer in paint to the question "What is Mannerism?" as the Villa Giulia is for architecture. The name of the room comes from the funniest anecdote in Renaissance art history (a field of striking solemnity and self-importance, I usually find). Vasari, now better known as a biographer than a painter, showed the room to his old master MIchelangelo and bragged that he had completed the work in 100 days. Michelangelo said, "It shows." I rather liked it, but then I have decadent tendencies. Paul III surveying New St Peter's dressed as the Jewish High Priest really made me happy! There was a scene of the distribution of cardinals hats to semi-nude men in advanced states of ascetical skinniness that made no sense at all - that's Mannerism for you!
I enjoyed meeting Zadok. He had to stay for a lecture in the glorious Sala Riario on the Internal Forum from James, Cardinal Stafford. Sad to say, even princes of the Church use PowerPoint. I skedaddled.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:38 PM
March 4, 2008
On being a beginner, or Lucy Clink and the drawing class, without me.
I was taking the picture. Click to see two of the things we drew yesterday on the flickr photostream.
One of the things I have enjoyed about both semesters in Rome (2003 and now) is taking a class - professors owe it to themselves to be bad at something once in awhile; that helps us keep our 100-level classes more honest. You know, there was a time, now very far away, when I knew very little about art history - and it pays to be reminded of what it feels like to be a beginner.
Oh - yes, I've taken drawing before - but somehow it always gets dropped when things get busy.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:49 PM
March 2, 2008
This Way to the Miraculous Statue!
I went to Sta Maria in Aracoeli today for the first time this trip - if you've ever climbed those stairs you'll know why I was putting it off until I needed to go for class prep! No pictures of the interior, much as I love it, other than this awful 1960s sign (at least I always think of them as 1960s - maybe they're 50s?) pointing to the chapel with the miraculous statue of the Infant Jesus. It oozes oil or some such and wears a particularly horrid 19th Century crown, but when taken to hospitals there are occasional miraculous cures. Me, I prefer the image of the Virgin on the high altar, but I didn't take a picture of it.
It was a beautiful morning on the Capitoline, though - just gorgeous. Click and see.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:56 PM
February 29, 2008
Frida in Philadelphia
I've never had the urge to go to Philadelphia for an art show, but for Frida Kahlo I'd go. Her content is beyond definition, and I'd really like to see the pictorial qualities.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:04 PM
Lucca's Stil Liberty shops
In the midst of all these Romanesque churches and the later palazzi there are a striking number (well, they struck me) of Stil Liberty storefronts. Stil Liberty, Liberty Style, is Italy's version of Art Nouveau; I was talking last night to an architectural historian who specailizes in Modernism who confirmed what I'd always heard - the name seems to refer both to the economic exuberance of the Liberal state after Unification and to the English shop Liberty of London. Lots of plaques around Rome, for instance, refer to the invasion and destruction of the Papal States, completed with the 1870 capture of Rome, as the Liberation of Rome. Liberty was a major purveyor of the Art nouveau - so the nomenclature in Italy is as though we called the 1980s in American the Laura Ashley era after that other London enterprise.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:39 AM
February 26, 2008
via Cenami, Lucca, Italy
So I'm walking around Lucca and I hit the via Cenami a few times and I keep asking myself why the name is so familiar and then I think AHAH! Giovanna Cenami! Which probably doesn't ring a bell for very many of my regular viewers. Do you know Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding? Of course you do! That's Giovanna on the right. Big Lucchese banking family, though the poor girl may never have seen the incredibly beautiful city of Lucca - she lived in Paris. Which in the 1430s was a little less thrilling than it is today. Giovanni Arnolfini was a Florentine. So teaching Northern Renaissance at Agnes Scott paid off, and in Tuscany!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:00 PM
But speaking of good or bad ecclesiastical acessories . . .
But speaking of good or bad ecclesiastical acessories, here's one of the the excellent confessionals at San Frediano, the university church in Pisa. The photo isn't much (sorry about that light fixture), but I do think that along with actually having times for confession having noble confessionals could only help bring people back to that sacrament! Or at least it would be more fun!
The confessionals are solid masonry set into the wall, no turning THESE into face-to-face encounter rooms!
The church itself is, like many of those in Pisa, Romanesque (click to go to flickr and see an exterior). Living in Rome, land of the Baroque make-over, lets me forget how popular Romanesque was in Italy.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:20 AM
February 25, 2008
The world's ugliest pulpit?
This pulpit at the front of the cathedral in Pisa may be the worst piece of 20th century religious art I've ever seen - and I've seen some doozies! Mind you, it's all marble. To make matters worse, it's within yards of one of the lovelier pulpits, by Giovanni Pisano from around 1300. I do not think this is a kneejerk medievalist reaction in favor of the Gothic (in fact, I don't much like late Gothic Italian sculpture), but look at those horrible shapes in the new pulpit! And the colors? What were they thinking? Oh, well - it looks like it will be easy to remove, someday.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:18 PM
February 15, 2008
Layered view in the Velabro
I'm happy with this photo; we're looking past film crew trucks (21st C) and through the Arch of Janus (4th C) to San Giorgio in Velabro (which is a welter of medieval construction and post 1993 reconstruction). The Velabro is the site of the swamp, long drained by the Cloaca Maxima, where the She-wolf found Romulus and Remus.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 PM
February 12, 2008
Zombie Error - Islam Forbids Depictions of Muhammad.
I hope that alumni/ae of Art 249 groan when they read this in the New York Times:
Islam forbids even respectful depictions of Muhammad, to avoid idolatry.
As they learn to say in that class, some schools of Islam in some periods forbid depictions of Muhammad. Because otherwise, why is it that we have depictions of Muhammad in art created by and for Muslims? Go here to see my quick list of 10 of these in the HWS image collection - and we're not a big university and I only teach Islamic Art and Architecture (Art 249) every once in awhile.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:55 PM
MKB for scale
Mary Kate studied the Ara Pacis with me before and insisted that we need an image in the HWS Visual Resources Collection with someone in it to show scale because she had gotten no idea of how big the figures in the reliefs are from studying it on screen - so here she is standing in front of the Italia/Tellus/Rhea Silvia relief (take your pick for the identification of the central female). Talk about embodiment! Now she'll be a virtual presence in Art 101 and Roman Art!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:47 PM
Back from Break and Ready for more Roman Art
We had a longish walk down south down the Via del Corso from the Flaminian Gate to the Piazza della Colonna (Column of Marcus Aurelius) and then a windy path to see the obelisk in front of Palazzo Montecitorio (formerly part of the the Augustan Sundial). My pedagogical goal with the long walk - after all, we passed within a couple of blocks of the Ara Pacis on our way south - goes to the difference between teaching with slides in a darkened classroom and teaching on site: in Rome we can embody the past, use our bodies to stimulate our imaginations. We don't look at pictures, we look at real things and we have real experiences of distance and time and topography. One of the great problems of studying ancient Rome is imagining away the intervening centuries, but I hope that task is easier for the crew after today.Because there's nothing more easily exhausted than a 20 year old, we took a cappucino break before heading in to the new Richard Meier pavilion to see the Altar of Augustan Peace. (Alright, I'm being cranky - I was ready for a little something warm myself.)
This was my second time inside the Meier building and my 3rd visit to the area - I have decided that I like the Meier building a good bit - though it looks too big from the north - probably entirely because of the auditorium the client added to the project. I'll go back and take more pictures with the Nikon.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:36 PM
February 7, 2008
San Clemente - a very layered site
Yesterday afternoon I got to San Clemente for a preview visit - I'm taking the Layers of Rome class there next week. Here's the basilica's site - go look - it's great! It includes what they're calling virtual reality views - draggable 360 images.
The Irish Dominicans have had the church since the 17th Century, and a Fr. Mulloly got to excavating under the building in the mid 19th C only to find that under the early Christian church was a 1st Century building dating to after the fire of 64 (Nero's fire). They also found a Mithraeum built into that level - underlying the later apses of the churches. There must have been a time when the Early Christian church was operating in one building while in the basement next door people were bathing in bull's blood! Exciting!
When Mithraism was suppressed in the late 4th Century the Mithraeum was filled in - and eventually the church of Saint Clement, the 3rd pope, expanded over it - a bit of architectural triumphalism, if they knew what they were building over.
There are some surviving 9th-11th century paintings in the lower church (they don't allow photography), one of which has an inscription that's a nice bit of early vernacular Italian.
Then there's the upper church, built using the early Christian church as a foundation - they just filled it in and started over on a slightly narrower scale. They reused lots of pieces, but the Cosmatesque floor is amazing.
The apse mosaic is strikingly odd - it's one of the few that doesn't draw on Early Christian models, instead putting a crucifix on a giant field of vine scrolls growing out of an acanthus (see - they're everywhere). The cross beams are occupied by doves. Very odd, like I said.
Then there's the Cyril and Methodius connection - St. Cyril is buried here, and the place is a major pilgrimage spot for Slavs of all sorts.
I'm looking forward to what the Layers class makes of the whole place.
Click over to the photo stream on flickr and see a lot more views of San Clemente.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:28 PM
Earliest known oil paintings . . . 7th C
This pushes a horizon back a bit - researchers have found oil and resin-based techniques in caves at Bamian dated to the 7th C. The National Geographic Online story has a reasonably good picture, though of course you can't tell it from fresco that way. Here's a photo gallery - two extra photos of paintings.
The UN World Heritage-listed Bamian Valley, which lies 145 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, is best known as the home of two giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.But murals depicting ornate swirling patterns, Buddhist imagery, and mythological animals also adorn 50 of up to a thousand caves in the region. The decorations date to between the 5th and 9th centuries A.D.
. . .
Oil is used in paint to help fix the dye and help it adhere to a surface. Oil also changes a paint's drying time and viscosity.
More complex than the standard mineral pigments and animal glue previously favored, the technique hints of Indian, West Chinese, and Mediterranean influences, Taniguchi said.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:33 AM
February 6, 2008
Acanthus, the Kudzu of the Mediterranean
Have I ever told you that acanthus is the kudzu of the Mediterranean? If not, you haven't taken the right class with me, because that's one of my favorite lines. The stuff grows everywhere! We had a nice specimen in Houghton House a few years ago, grown from seed by my colleague Stan Mathews. Of course, it's everywhere in Rome in the corinthian form, too. Here's Wikipedia on the Corinthian order - go look and compare.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:37 PM
February 3, 2008
Life is a battle
This past Wednesday I got to see one of my favorite things in Rome, the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus - click to go to flickr to see the whole thing!
Some (most?) scholars feel secure in identifying the central figure as the son of the emperor Trajan Decius. The general popularity of battle scenes on 3rd Century sarcophagi makes an identification kind of unnecessary - the general theme of life as a battle is most of what we need to see here to think about the 3rd Century.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:47 AM
February 2, 2008
All is forgiven? Italy loans art to the Getty . . .
Well, this has always been about position, not right and wrong, but here's an announcement about a major loan of Berninis to the Getty.
The end of the article sounds like someone's been in couples counselling:
"The Getty and the institutions in Italy for many years have had solid relationships that were tense during the time the negotiations were going forward," said Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig."The relationship that now exists is very solid," Hartwig said.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:46 AM
February 1, 2008
Don't tell your family what you've got - they may pop you into a home to take it!
A couple of years ago there was an interesting story out of England in which an elderly woman died leaving some Fra Angelico paintings in her bedroom. Her nephew made what struck me as some ill-informed comments. Here's more evidence that Ms. Preston's nephew was not only ill-informed about his aunt, but is a twit - she had PILES of stuff in her house: millions of pounds worth of art and books.
via Zadok the Roman, who comments here.
my previous comment.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:53 PM
January 31, 2008
The semester has fully begun...
The semester is fully underway and students have lots of assignments! They had an exam for the intensive portion (5 days a week, longer hours) of their Italian language and culture classes yesterday and today. The ones in digital photography are taking pictures of St. Peter's, the ones in my class are writing about portraiture, and everyone's reading Marshall McLuhan - and three museums this week!
Monday we went to the Vatican Museums - utter overload, of course. I concentrated on the huge sarcophagus set-up in the Pio-Gregoriano collection, trying to prepare them for the Mathews book. The advantage of a big load of real things is that it sometimes helps students to understand two important things. First, that ancient art was not all one-off pieces of creative sculpture, but was often semi-industrial production customers bought off the shelf - in other words, if you see 27 Jonah sarcophagi (and I only exaggerate slightly) you begin to believe what your medievalist professor keeps hammering on, that art is not always about self-expression. Of course, if they actually went to a Cezanne blockbuster and saw dozens of paintings of exactly the same thing they might understand that they've been lied to by the world about the Romantic Artist as Genius of Expression. You don't paint a dozen haystacks and mean anything particularly expressive by them. Second, they come to understand the art historical study of iconography a bit more clearly. Very often when our students see only the tiny selection of images in a textbook they learn to parrot our idea of iconography, but they don't really understand how the profession worked out the patterns. A BIG dose of realia helps there.
Tuesday we went to the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo al Therme (you can click on Flickr and see my pictures from my preview visit last week). Again, we ran through the traditional narrative of Roman sculpture - verism, naturalism, idealism, and back. I was especially pleased with the sudden introduction of the carved iris and pupil in the galleries of the 150s - they saw that novelty clearly! So then I set them free to choose two busts to analyze in terms of patronal intentions. We'll see how that turns out. We also got to run through the Rosso Pompeiano show. They liked the garden room - and then we elevatored it up to the top floor for Livia's garden room! It's hard to do comparison on the hoof, but these two are physically close enough to pull it off, I think.
Wednesday, Nick took the photo class to the Museum of Rome, the Palazzo Braschi, where there is a great exhibition of photos of St. Peter's from 1850 to the present. There are splendid photos - everything from very early work to stereo cards (three set up with viewers!) to things taken last year. More than that, though, the photos make a great starting point for a course whose secondary concentration is how photography is used to construct a sense of identity and a sense of place. I tagged along just to look!
Today, we're using the tickets from the Pal. Massimo to get into the Palazzo Altemps. The tickets are good for 3 days for a couple of buildings in the city, and since we already have them I added an optional come-along-if-you-want-to session. I know I have 3 takers already!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:32 AM
January 27, 2008
The most amazing thing I saw on Saturday
I went to the Palazzo Massimo building of the Museo Nazionale Romano to preview for class next week. Gosh it's going to be a mess. I already know the permanent collection well enough to walk through with them, but it's somewhat disarranged for a travelling show from Naples, Rosso Pompeiano. They've hauled a bunch of paintings up from Naples.
The most splendid thing is what my horrid photograph shows - the garden room from the House of the Golden Bracelet at Pompeii. I had never seen it live. I had no idea. Here are some clearer photos, but no context. Here's some context, but the paintings have already been removed. The room is amazing and amazingly intact. I'm in love with the herms carrying pictures on their heads - one of them is on the right of my photo. The composition of elements is wonderfully complicated - what a neat room! It was worth the price of admission by itself.
Pal. Massimo doesn't have any space set aside for changing exhibitions, so they just scooted things around and jammed the Pompeian things in. It doesn't work all that well, but it's probably about the best solution to the problem.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:43 PM
Friday church going
I spent most of Friday afternoon at Sta. Pudenziana, Sta Prassede, and Sta Maria Maggiore, 3 of my favorite churches in Rome. At Sta Pudenziana I got to take this picture of the apse mosaic from the organ loft - it pays to chat up tour guides!
This is the earliest surviving apse mosaic in Rome and quite interesting. Christ is seated on an elaborate, gemmed chair which is NOT an imperial throne (well, if you believe T. Mathews The Clash of Gods argument), but a divine throne similar to the one the Phidian Zeus sat on at Olympia. My students are going to learn it that way, since they brought Mathews with them - one of the big course threads is looking at how unstable and diverse the early images of Jesus are and how they settle down at the end of the period.
Then there's the text in the mosaic, which is also appropriates soemthing from Jupiter/Zeus, this time one of his titles. The pages of the codex Jesus is holding read:DOMINUS CONSERVATOR ECCLESIAE PUDENTIANAE (sorry it's a little hard to read - my details from Friday didn't come out well enough to post). A really clever article a while ago argued really convincingly, and in advance of Mathews on iconography, that the use of CONSERVATOR is a lift from Jupiter conservator urbis and helps us date the mosaic to just after the 410 Visigothic sack.* Someone is paralleling Christ's preservation of churches, which were not sacked, with Jupiter's earlier title. In the context of conservative, pagan Rome that was quite a pointed usage.
*Schlatter, F.W. "The Text in the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana." Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 43, No. 2. (Jun., 1989), pp. 155-165. I didn't pull that out of my head - JSTOR is my friend.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:00 PM
December 20, 2007
Ah, the Sanctimony of the Nation-state
My colleague and I are teaching a course on arts/media and identity together this semester for all of the students going with us: Inventing Rome, Inventing Romans. We're going to do 5 or 6 case studies of how different folks have invented the identity of Romans (and Italians) by deploying typical media of their times - sculpture at the Ara Pacis (and its Fascist and post-modern reconstructions), oratory in the Renaissance, sport in contemporary Italy (Forza Italia!) - you see the point.
I guess we have to go to this show of reclaimed antiquities, with which this silly modern thing called Italy tries to identify itself with Magna Graecia and the Etruscans by claiming that anything dug from the Italian soil belongs to the Nation. Here's an Italian version.
The headline in the Washington Post version is especially offensive - There's No Place but Home For This Stolen Italian Art. On things like this, I can sympathize with Metternich - "Italy is only a geographical expression."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:29 AM
December 17, 2007
Quantity and quality at the Getty
This is an interesting article about the Getty. Since I've only been there once, I really don't know the collection well enough to say - but it sounds plausible.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 AM
Long delayed gratification
I finally got down to New York City this weekend, in part to see the classical wing at the Met. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but I couldn't resist one or two of their Endymion sarcophagi (follow the link for a full view).
GOSH the newly refurbished south end of the building is something. I should've taken some views, but wasn't thinking. Go here - lots of pictures.
The main floor is filled with stunning stuff, and the second floor is set up for pontificators like me. I hope I wasn't too boring when I started exclaiming "see - that's exactly what I was saying downstairs, but here you can see a metal one and a ceramic one side by side! The ceramicist is imitating the metalworker, not the other way round!" The second floor, you see, has big glass cases packed with stuff arranged to warm the well-informed heart, though it's probably a little less enthralling for people who don't teach the classical courses - except for the Etruscan chariot!
So why can't I resist Endymion? Well, with my selfish medievalist bent, I look at the Endymion scenes on sarcophagi and see the promise of eternal life, eternal youth, and nightly visits from the goddess who loves him (though there is that annoying problem of sleeping forever) and understand that it's a fine example of non-Christian, non-mystery religion interest in a pleasant afterlife -- but then I flash forward to the Jonah sarcophagi. Here's a great picture of one of them. See the similarity between Jonah (in the upper right under a gourd vine) and Endymion (bottom right of the picture above)? I forget how long we've known this, but the standard interpretation of this phenomenon in Early Christian art is that sarcophagus cutters were working out of pattern books. When (probably) pagan sarcophagus makers were asked by Christian customers for an illustration of the Jonah story, someone flipped around in the pattern book and pulled Endymion out for the whiny-Jonah-under-the-gourd part of the story (if you don't remember that part, it comes after the whale - here you go).
It's a great example of how one goes about making art for a new religion -- not an example of syncretism, but of folks using an already accepted visual language to tell a new story.
And that, dear readers, is exactly the kind of thing I'll be teaching in Rome!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:06 AM
December 12, 2007
Chicago's Forged Gauguin
Here's a lovely story from the Art Newspaper about a forged Gauguin sculpture currently at the Chicago Art Institute - and unlike the AP story, the Art Newspaper knows about how much the Art Institute paid.
So why was it that no one seems to have questioned the Gauguin? The sculpture appeared to be based on a tiny drawing of a faun sculpture in a sketchbook which the artist used in Martinique in 1887. A work entitled “Faun” was also listed in a Gauguin exhibition held at the Nunès and Fiquet gallery in Paris in 1917. These references are noted in Christopher Gray’s Gauguin sculpture catalogue (1963) and Merete Bodelsen’s authoritative study of Gauguin’s ceramics (1964).It seems that the Greenhalghs set out to recreate this missing sculpture. What is astonishing is that they were able to design and fire such a successful stoneware forgery, which had no obvious features to reveal it as a modern fake. Ms Howie, an experienced dealer, was originally captivated by the work: “We lived with it, and I cannot tell you what pleasure it gave us. It was a wonderful object.”
Like many successful forgers, the Greenhalgh family gave the experts what they were looking for - something missing that they could discover.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
December 6, 2007
Roman furniture found at Herculaneum!
Archaeologists working on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (no, just because they've been excavating at Herculaneum and Pompeii for almost 300 years doesn't mean they're close to finished) found a ivory throne (ivory veneer over wood). This is the earliest one to be found (I'm a little annoyed at the 'only' - we have a surviving 6th century ivory throne in Ravenna - this is the only one found from the early imperial period).
Here's the National Geographic piece - nice pictures of a panel they found and a wall painting showing what a similar chair looked like in use.
The BBC has a slide show, including excavation shots.
This throne is decorated with at least one scene of Attis, one of those interesting eastern Mediterranean gods who have something to do with death and rebirth or fertility. I doubt this will add anything to our knowledge, but it is interesting to find such a high status version in such a high status house.
By the way, if everyone didn't expect to see Pompeii, I'd take the class to Herculaneum. You get all the issues of Italian urban life in the 1st Century and it's much more compact - you can actually see it all. Pompeii is too big for that. I did win the battle of Florence. The case I made was that I don't intend to teach Renaissance art and we know that if we don't plan a field trip to Florence they will all go on their own. So, no weekend in Florence! Hurrah!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM
December 2, 2007
Talk about an incomplete story: Lost art found, but...?
Missing baroque masterpiece is discovered in pizza restaurant is the headline. We learn about missing, baroque, masterpiece, and the discovery, but no one explains how the masterpiece of baroque furniture got to the pizza joint!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:20 AM | Comments (2)
November 25, 2007
Environmental Degradation at Westminster Abbey - interior, and caused by our modern wimpiness
Environmental conditions inside Westminster Abbey are now causing “serious concern”, according to one of its own conservators, Marie Louise Sauerberg. The Coronation Chair, commissioned in 1296 and used for virtually every crowning since 1308, has suffered from serious flaking of its gilded surface. Humidity levels fluctuate considerably in the abbey, mainly because of central heating. Polychromed wood is particularly vulnerable to these changes, causing the paint to flake.
. . .
Serious damage has also been sustained by the ancient sedilia, or priests’ stalls, which date from around 1307. The sedilia, on the south side of the high altar, are decorated with paintings and are among the abbey’s greatest treasures. They also feature some of the earliest English paintings on panel. The sedilia have long been regarded as a rare survival, and William Blake recorded them in a watercolour in 1775.
. . .
The condition of the sedilia is now so fragile that if one were to pass one’s hand over the surface, a considerable area of the surviving 700-year-old paint would simply fall off. Even though they are just beyond the reach of tourists’ hands, tiny paint fragments occasionally fall to the floor.
The throne, too, is on view but beyond the reach of the public in the ambulatory. It is moved, however, for every coronation to the area in front of the high altar, for the new monarch’s anointing and crowning.
The environmental damage is largely the result of heating in the abbey, which reduces relative humidity. This is now thought to vary from around 30% to 80% throughout the year, a very high range.
. . .
Although heating is essential for worshippers, it may be possible to reduce the temperature slightly. [my emphases]
Of course, heating is not essential for worshipers - only for modern worshipers. One of the coldest moments of my life was in the crypt of the Church of St. Mary Magdalen at Vezelay in July. Stone churches are cold! We moderns are not very willing to do more than kneel. Of course, medieval folks were always arguing over which degree of hierarchy got to wear what kind of fur hoods in church, so they were cold, too! Villard de Honnecourt provides a design for a gimbelled hand heater, after all.
Still, they had better solve this fast.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:00 PM
October 31, 2007
Turning the Trevi Fountain Red
I had lunch yesterday with a friend from Rome who went by the Trevi the other day during its brief red spell. He says he rather liked it - that it was a break from the (imagine the gesture) consistency that is Roma. When someone at the table asked if it was a Communist protester he laughed and reminded her that the Communists are too conservative now for anything this amusing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2007
More art finds - this time in the garage. Under the sleeping bag the cat used to sleep on.
Doesn't do much for me - I prefer the Tamoya. But still. Just goes to show that people who cavalierly clean out garages are menaces to posterity.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2007
Another suspected international art theft ring bites the dust
At Cronaca you can read about the big Goya theft - it turns out not to have been anything executed by a sophisticated ring of international art thieves. A trucker grabbed the painting and took it home. His girl friend didn't like it; she thought the faces were scary, so it stayed in the basement. Oh, well.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:49 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2007
About that Sickert show
Here's a story from 24 Hour Museum with five photographs of works in the exhibition of Walter Sickert paintings I talked about earlier in the month.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:18 AM | Comments (1)
October 23, 2007
She found a Rufino Tamayo on the street!
This is a great story of stolen art found from Bloomberg/muse!
Gibson, a tall, blond 53-year-old resident of the Upper West Side, went out for a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning in 2003. She spotted a large painting poking out from among the garbage bags left on the sidewalk on West 72nd Street. In her pre-caffeinated haze, she kept walking."I'm all about de-cluttering, so why was I going to take it home?'' she recalled in an interview.
A few minutes and a cup of coffee later, Gibson returned to the trash pile, saw the painting and reconsidered.
She knew she had something more important than junk art, but it took her 2 years to find out just what. She returned the painting; now Sotheby's is auctioning it off - read the whole story!
Here's a story with a picture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:30 AM | Comments (1)
October 17, 2007
Now that's a departmental collection worth visiting
Lots of school collections are 'teaching collections,' meaning that we know they're not really all that great, but they've got fun examples to show students.
Yes, there's the inevitable not to Edward Said in the article, but blip over it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:44 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2007
No one under 18 allowed - into an art show?
At the Barbican in London a big show opens to a limited audience: "More than 300 Roman sculptures, Renaissance paintings and Chinese watercolours will be put on show today, but no one aged under 18 will be allowed to see them."
The two things they list - Mapplethorpe photos, which are certainly pushing all sorts of envelopes, and a fig leaf. Yes, the absence of parts - ". . . the stone fig-leaf that was commissioned to mask the private parts of a cast of Michelangelo’s David when it was presented to Queen Victoria." They have a photo! Of the fig leaf, not of a Mapplethorpe.
I can only think that an age restriction will make are seem more exciting to the young. By any means necessary, I say.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2007
Patrons and Clients
Here's a fascinating (long) story about the relationship between museum director and major patron - the Dia:Beacon situation. It is entirely appropriate that the story was written by a business corresponsdent.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:35 PM
October 4, 2007
Sickert the Ripper
Now this is a show I'd like to see:
WALTER SICKERT’S reputation may never recover from being fingered as Jack the Ripper by the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell five years ago.Art critics and historians have dismissed the charges, based on an investigation that cost her $2million, as circumstantial, ignorant and downright fanciful without quite shaking the macabre link between one of Britain’s greatest painters and the Victorian serial killer who disembowelled five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888.
Now audiences have a chance to judge for themselves whether Sickert was a killer or just an artist with a particularly ghoulish imagination when the paintings which Cornwell cited as evidence of her suspicions are displayed together for the first time.
Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Central London from October aims to “provide the first major account of his reinvention of the nude as a subject for modern painting.”
The star attractions among more than 25 canvases and related drawings will be four profoundly disturbing paintings from around 1908 known as The Camden Town Murder paintings.
Go read the whole thing. There's one picture.
Further:
Sickert is an under appreciated painter (as one can say about any British painter after the 18th century peak, I suppose). The Sickert painting that first hit me was not one of the Camden Town Nudes but Miss Earhart's Arrival (1932, late work), which I saw at the Tate - click and see. It's really something - it captures English weather and Britishy Modernism. It's a big painting - almost 2 meters wide - and grabbed me from across a room. I have no idea if Sickert was the Ripper (I read the Cornwell book and thought she'd better stick to novels), but he sure was a painter.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:31 AM
October 2, 2007
A controversial deaccessioning - Randolph (-Macon Women's) College
You seldom see the word "dastardly" used anymore, but here we go:
“This is just a dastardly thing to do,” he said. “I’m just at a loss of words … this is a terrible, terrible deed done to the students, the townspeople, and everybody who enjoys the collection.”
Randolph College, the Randolph-Macon Women's College until this past July, is spending its endowment too fast for the taste of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and has decided to sell four paintings. They're hoping to pick up $32 million. The publicity might not hurt going coed, either. Change your name, show that you have less commitment to frou frou things like art collecting - that'll bring in the guys. The quotation above is from the local story in the Lynchburg, VA, News & Advance. More personal info than the New York Times version, but the times does have a picture of the George Bellows painting they hope will bring $25 million.
The Bellows, though, has more than monetary value - it has symbolic importance to the collection. All the better to sell it to show the board's new direction. From the local story, here's Ellen Agnew, who resigned as associate director of the museum in August:
She calls “Men of the Docks,” the “cornerstone of the collection.”It was the first painting purchased under the direction of Louise Jordan Smith, the school’s first art professor, to form the permanent art collection.
“Its significance is beyond measure in what it symbolizes - the vision, the foresight, the dedicated purpose of Louise Jordan Smith and the students and the Lynchburg community.”
Ahah - here's a better version of the picture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 AM
September 27, 2007
Norman Rockwell, Stephen Spielberg, and Stolen Art
I had read a few shorter articles here and there about the stolen Norman Rockwell Stephen Spielberg has - but this story from the Providence Journal explains lots of things - like the serious question of the involvement of the art dealer who sold it to him. Should she have known it was stolen? And what does the assassination of Martin Luther King have to do with all this?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:02 AM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2007
Interesting private collection for sale
Private collectors and their collections interest me more than collecting for myself - luckily for my wallet. Here's an article on the sale at Sotheby's (along with a link to get you to the works) of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Collection - yes, that Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. What's more, it was a collection built entirely after they left the U.S.S.R.
Go to Sotheby's and cut and paste or type L07117 (zero, not o) into the Lot Search field in the upper right corner and take a look. I wonder why Sotheby's doesn't make permanent links to lots. Hmmm.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:42 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2007
Talking about stained glass
I have a confession to make - I don't really care about stained glass - but it's available in quantity in much of America. So, I've learned to deal.
My Gothic class is part-way through their second assignment - take a window at St Stephen's, Geneva, and explain the iconography. Tonight I heard from 6 folks, covering Ss. Cecilia, Francis de Sales, Boniface, Lawrence, Louis of France, and Margaret of Scotland. This was a random assortment of students based on their availability (the rest will talk on Sunday afternoon), but it went quite well! I got to talk about how to visit churches, gothic architecture up close, hammerbeam construction, and workshops (there are at least 3 and maybe 4 glass workshops represented in the building).
All in all a satisfying evening - they're off to a good start!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:05 PM | Comments (0)
September 5, 2007
Coffee photos with your morning coffee?
Times Online has a story and slideshow of 13 beautiful photographs of the hard work behind my morning pot of coffee (though I'm drinking a South East Asian blend from Dean's Beans myself this morning, and most of these pictures seem to be South America and Africa). The story is about a new exhibition of photos of coffee work by Sebastiao Salgado sponsored by Illy (oh - I have two cans of their espresso, too - I can't grind coffee fine enough to work in my moka):
. . . he travelled to Brazil and to Guatemala, India and Ethiopia, to shoot workers along the trail that leads to the espresso consumed – the company claims – in 50,000 of the world’s best restaurants. The title of the exhibition is In Principio (In the Beginning) – a double reference, presumably, to the origin of Salgado’s career and of Illy’s coffee.
It's quite an interesting story - and the pictures are amazing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
August 20, 2007
Art Sweat Shops?
Many of the Dafen artists are Chinese art college graduates who work in the picture factories there for up to 16 hours a day. They usually get paid around 20 pence per painting and may have to produce anything up to 30 pieces a day to make a living wage to support their families.This is a very strange story about an exhibition in London about Chinese art factories producing copies of Western classics. Walmart is involved! Go read it!
further:
I just noticed that Megan McArdle blogged this too, and asked "Weren't many of the originals produced in similar factory-like conditions?" My quick answer over there was 'sorta.' Apprentices in the days before the death of the studio system were certainly more like craftsmen than Artistes, especially with regard to any ideas of creativity. One of the complaints made in the story: “Being a painter myself, I can well imagine how wonderful it would be for the students to be able to express their own creative skills as opposed to being obliged to make copies of works where they have little or no knowledge of the history and condition that inspired those works.”
I doubt that any pre-Modern artist had the same idea of creativity we prize today.
There's a story Vasari tells about Leonardo da Vinci as an apprentice in Verrocchio's workshop. Leonardo was assigned the head of an angel on the left, and his work was so beautiful that Verrocchio swore never to paint again. True or not (and Vasari is not always to be trusted), the lesson is that apprentices were supposed to submerge their work in that of the master.
Now about the sweatshop aspect - surely no pre-modern workshop was particularly comfortable, but it wasn't a modern sweatshop - especially in the mass production way. On the other hand, the environmental risks of pre-Modern painting was positively Mainland Chinese - and remember that they made them all at home until pretty late in the history of art.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:46 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2007
13th Century Limoges Enamel Crucifix found in a dumpster.
VIENNA (Reuters) - An 800-year-old, gold-plated crucifix that went missing after being seized by the Nazis has been found in a rubbish skip in Austria, police said.The crucifix, made of copper and enamel, was crafted in Limoges, France, and was part of a Polish art collection brought to Austria during Nazi rule, Josef Holzberger, police spokesman in Salzburg, said on Thursday.
It was found in 2004 in the lakeside winter resort of Zell am See by a woman combing through a skip filled with the discarded possessions of a neighbor who had just died.
"The lady had a soft spot for old crockery and was rummaging for plates when she found the crucifix," said Holzberger. "She asked the deceased's family, and they said she could have it."
Last month the woman showed the crucifix to a friend who realized it might be something special and took it to a museum.
Omigosh.
They have 2 pictures - go look.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:27 PM
August 14, 2007
Offer a public service and some people will take advantage
New in the annals of forgetfulness . . .
Forgetting to pick up your suit from the dry-cleaners is easily done. Forgetting to pick up your collection of 64 valuable 19th-century Indian paintings from a museum is another matter.That is exactly what happened to a British man who took his collection to the British Museum’s free object identification service - only to forget to collect it for 14 years.
The museum tried repeatedly to contact the man about his important collection of lavishly detailed paintings of Hindu deities of the Tamil country, created in India around 1820 for British patrons.
Richard Blurton, the museum’s curator in the Asia department, made attempts to find the owner, but there was no word from him until a few months ago when he casually appeared again, saying that he had come to collect his paintings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:28 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2007
Dresden Old Master Gallery appears in Second Life
The Dresden Old Master Gallery has created a virtual version of itself for an online environment. Cologne Cathedral is following suit.
I think I feel an assignment for my Gothic Art and Architecture course coming on!
(Oh, yes, it really is called that - it's the Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. I don't know (it's not my part of the field), but this may be one of the places our English phrase for those old painters comes from. I always thought it was really funny, though, that they really WERE the Alte Meister.)
This is the story in Wired.
Here's their regular website.
Here's the Second Life version.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (1)
August 8, 2007
Albatrosses of a feather . . .
Mervyn Peake, the Gormenghast trilogy man, made illustrations for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Figures - two things I can't bring myself to finish meet. They look like sub-Symbolist dreamy things to me.
Gormenghast was one of my first exercises of Taste - not good taste or bad taste, but Taste. I was 12 or 13, and I did not enjoy the books. I never bothered to read the third. I'm not certain, at this distance, that I finished the second one. Tastes differ - and Peake was not to mine.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:51 AM | Comments (1)
Another private collection prepares for public showing, this one in San Francisco
Another big private art collector has decided to build a musuem rather than dispersing his collection when he and his wife die.
Gap founder Donald Fisher, one of the world's leading contemporary art collectors and a powerful force in local politics, has offered to build a sprawling museum in the Presidio to showcase his vast collection, which until now has largely been hidden away in his company's San Francisco headquarters.Since Fisher and his wife, Doris, founded Gap Inc. in 1969, they have amassed what is widely considered to be among the most extensive private collections of 20th and 21st century art. Yet with the exception of pieces that are occasionally loaned to museums, much of what they own has never been seen by people outside the art world.
The Fishers, whose retail empire brings in about $16 billion a year, hope to build a 100,000-square-foot museum with 55,000 square feet of gallery space - 5,000 more square feet than at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - to house their collection of more than 1,000 works.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the one with the big eye. This is going to be a big museum - but up in the Presidio; it sounds like Fisher has the pull to get permission to build there, too.
I don't know anything much about the collection, but 1,000 pieces is no more than the nucleus of a museum, especially a fairly big one (55,000 sq feet of gallery). I guess the Fishers are going to leave them some acquisition funds? You think?
The giant bow and arrow above - that's a sculpture Fisher donated to the city and erected outside the Gap headquarters. It's a pretty bad sign that none of the versions I've found on Flickr give an artist's name, though it seems to be titled "Cupid's Span," a joke about its juxtaposition with the Bay Bridge. I'm not sure.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:57 AM
August 6, 2007
Stolen to order?
Daylight art theft in Nice, and the police are suggesting the four paintings - two Breugels, a Money, and a Sisely - were stolen on commission. The weirdest thing about the caper is that two of the works (the BBC doesn't tell us which, damn them!) were stolen about 10 years ago in another commonplace of art theft, the Inside Job - "Two of them were stolen from the same museum nine years ago, but were recovered within a week. The then curator was later jailed for theft."
Oh! Weird and weirder - the Sisely has been stolen 3 times! 2007, 1998, and 1978! It must be some picture! That's from a fuller story in The Age (though they do date the Sisely at 1980, an unfortunate typo under the circumstances).
So this is one of the standard narratives of art theft coverage, "stolen to order of reclusive billionaire who will keep them in a secret gallery because they're too famous to sell." Hm.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:25 AM
August 2, 2007
The world's largest carpet, for a very big mosque
The Gulf States aren't just building tall buildings, they're also building giant mosques. Which can use giant carpets.
Authorities in Iran unveiled what they described as the world's largest hand-woven rug yesterday at Tehran's open-air prayer grounds.
At 60,546 square feet (5,625 square meters), the carpet is the size of a soccer field and was woven by 1,200 weavers in three villages over the course of a year and a half.
The mammoth floor covering is destined for a monumental new mosque under construction in the United Arab Emirates. Emirati officials commissioned Iran's state-owned rug manufacturer to create the piece for the central prayer hall of the giant Sheikh Zayed mosque, slated to open this fall in the capital city of Abu Zaby (Abu Dhabi).
There's no requirement, of course, that there be a single carpet for the prayer hall of a mosque, but the project fits the case of gigantism pretty well. And it looks like a pretty spectacular carpet.
There have been large capets woven for particular mosques for a long time - there's an Ardabil carpet at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that's 23x13 feet - but that's a welcome mat next to this. Go here and scroll to the bottom - click to enlarge. LACMA doesn't seem to have a dedicated page for it.
This page at the Victoria and Albert shows the reinstallation of their pendant to the LACMA carpet. Neat!
Still and all, this new carpet is all about scale - scale of the project and scale of the result. 1,200 weavers! 38 tons of wool and cotton! 5,625 square meters!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:39 AM
July 30, 2007
Characteristic Art Forms of the Early 21st Century
You know, it may all be parasitic and derivative, but the mashup is a fine, fine genre:
(via Miss McArdle)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:51 PM
July 28, 2007
A new Pugin book
Altar of the Blessed Sacrament,
St Barnabas Cathedral, Nottingham
Originally uploaded by Lawrence OP.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1852 A 40-year-old man was in a secure room in Bethlem Hospital for the Insane; he recognised no one, not even his wife; his head had been shaved, and he had become what was described as “very dirty in his habits”. This was the man who, six months before, had designed the clock tower now known as Big Ben. His name was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.
Yes, there was always something a little over the top about Pugin - maybe more than a little bit. His book Contrasts is one of my favorite examples of both Gothic Revivalism and architectural polemic on behalf of any style. He offers the viewer side-by-side views of England before the Reformation and as she was in the 1840s - and it isn't pretty. Dickens makes a nice comparison (one the reviewer draws).
Here's one pair - the Chapel Royal, Brighton and St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Pugin means every bit of it, down to the choice of nomenclature. A 'chapel royal' puts more stress on the royal family - and the personification of royal immorality, George IV, since we're talking Brighton - than on the company of the saints. Pugin also means us to see the contrast between the stage decoration of Brighton - look at the curtains above - and the perpendicular style ceiling at Windsor as the difference between meretriciousness and truth: truth to materials produces truth to style - and is intimately tied to truth in Religion. Pointed Architecture, which is how Pugin mainly designated Gothic, is Christian Architecture.
And here's a more Dickensian point - Contrasted Residences for the Poor - the Panopticon vs. the Almshouse. Did you know there are still almshouses? My friend at mirabilis.ca sent me a link to one she visited once - where she received a pilgrim's badge! The Hospital of St Cross, near Winchester. Click and then follow the link for Brothers to see the badge-men (click, click on 'badge,' scroll to definition #4 - or search for badge-man). Now go back to Pugin's vision of an almshouse. I'm willing to bet cash money that the outfits the pensioners at St Cross wear now are in fact a mid-19th century revival, not a continuous survival.
I'm working on an article on Richard Upjohn, an English immigrant to America who revolutionized architecture here - both by bringing a rigor to the practice of Gothic Revival and by founding the American Institute of Architects. Upjohn had copies of at least 5 Pugin books, including True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. That fun fact comes from a handy article by Judith Hull, "The 'School of Upjohn': Richard Upjohn's Office," about Upjohn's work as an architectural educator in the days before schools of architecture in America, the first of which (MIT) opened in 1866.
The Victorian architects inspired a lot of derision in the early 20th century, but Pugin inspires devotion today - there's a Pugin Society, devoted to, among other things, saving Pugin buildings.
Click here and see the Pugin pictures (including a great view of Big Ben) from the Gothic Revival group on Flickr. The altar above is a Pugin from the group.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 AM
July 24, 2007
Lipstick on your collar? On our painting?
A woman kissed a Cy Twombly monochrome white painting and left a lipstick stain. She's being prosecuted.
No word in any of the coverage I read about cleaning it.
I don't think of Twombly as a monochromist, but there you go. Not really my period. Here's a google image search for Twombly. As you'll see, on lots of the paintings a lipstick smudge wouldn't have shown. She must have meant it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:13 AM
July 18, 2007
What's a National Heritage?
Two very good pieces at Times Online about cultural heritage.
The news that seven major artworks on loan to the National Gallery might be sold and may leave the country has a depressing air of inevitability. They are magnificent pieces. Titian’s Portrait of a Young Man ( pictured, far right) is a serene early portrait, less fleshy than others, sparse in colour yet rich in detail. Although it has only been on loan to the National Gallery for 15 years, it sat in Temple Newsam House near Leeds for more than 150 years. Likewise, the five paintings by Nicolas Poussin, the Sacraments, have been on loan only since 2002, but were in the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle for centuries. And few works could be more important to national heritage than Rubens’s exuberant Apotheosis of King James I, which belongs to Viscount Hampden and may also be up for sale.
His list:
1 Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt
2 The Bridgewater Madonna by Raphael
3 Portrait of Edward Grimston by Petrus Christus
4 Winter Scene and The Bird Trap by the two Breughels
5 Portrait of an Old Woman by Rembrandt
6 Judas and the Thirty Pieces of Silver by Rembrandt
7 The Cholmondeley Family by William Hogarth
8 War and Peace by Van Dyck
9 The Reverend Sir Henry Bate and Lady Bate-Dudley, both by Thomas Gainsborough
10 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows by John Constable
11 Erasmus by Holbein
Saved for whom? These works never belonged to Britain anyway, says Rachel Campbell-Johnston
The National Gallery is undoubtedly facing a crisis. Loaned masterpieces by Titian and Poussin are about to be put on the market. And how can we stump up the many millions that will be necessary to buy them? The likelihood is that they will be sold abroad. The loss rips a hole in the fabric of our heritage.Or does it? Look at the list of other art works which Chris Bryant thinks we are most at risk of losing. Fewer than than a half are by British artists or artists working in Britain. The rest were, in the first place, acquired from abroad by a nation which had produced no Titians or Rembrandts of its own. Art was a trophy by which competing countries could manifest their power. Paintings were not icons of an art-historical legacy. They were symbols of status. And canvases were swapped between monarchs and connoisseurs and collectors like children swap Pokémon cards in the hope of getting the whole set.
I tend to agree with Campbell-Johnston - invest money and efforts saving the ones that are somehow really "British" - especially the Petrus Christus! Earliest surviving portrait of an English subject!
However, her argument does depend on the assent to the idea that imperialism=BAD. Imperialism is, of course, part of the British Heritage and as such evidence of the British Collector abroad and British Gran Tourismo is a defensible collection priority. Can't the "we were wicked imperialists - let it go abroad" become a kind of whitewashing of the British record? The huge collections of Dutch works alone are also interesting reflections on a very special relationship which is not a story of one-way imperialism.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
July 17, 2007
Why we blog - and badges!
I apologize for the slow posting lately - I'm in a frenzy of deadlineness. I'm trying to get several things finished before the tenure box goes in - and then there's actually writing the tenure case. I have a teaching philosophy, but I'd rather enact it than write about it (and isn't that just the kind of sentence I need to use?).
And I've had a house guest this week who comes up periodically from Atlanta to read things at the Cornell Library (mainly in the rare book room) that he can't get elsewhere. He stays with me and drives down to Ithaca every morning. Having a human being (sorry Argyle) to talk with reduces some of the blog-urge. Oh - he blogs occasionally at Reformation Professor. Ah - grad school friends. You forget sometimes how much you miss them.
And then there's the Hand List of Words for Talking about Medieval Badges.
I did most of the reading in dictionaries for this year before last and left the text file sitting on my hard drive. I was looking up some words again and realized that I had those already and might as well post them somewhere I can get at them. Take a look. I'm up to cockle-shelled, an adjectival derivative of a cockleshell shaped badge. The example the OED gave was of a St. Michael badge (Mont St Michel also used the cockleshell, being sea-girt and all).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM
July 16, 2007
Oh dear. In the case of Giger - Art imitates Life
Giger, the artist of weird biomechanical things, really is a little weird.
"The places I liked the most were the dark ones," Giger explained. "As soon as I could dress myself I wore black."
He has odd biomechanoid things in his garden - go look at the pictures.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM
July 9, 2007
Where Should the Getty send this statue?
The New York Times has a story about one of the largest pieces Italy wants back (great photo essay) - but the story suggests that the destination may be a little less clear than we think. That's one of the problems with looted goods - we don't really know where they're from. The townsfolk of Aidone say the Aphrodite is from Morgantina and belongs in their museum. The archaeologists aren't so sure - the statue is made from similar stone as stuff found in Morgantina, but that's not conclusive proof. There are lots of reasons Aidone wants it back - self-esteem, image, patrimony, and money - they know that more tourists would come.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:05 AM
July 5, 2007
Tombaroli in Decline?
The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on antiquities from the point of view of the tombaroli, the looters.
Pietro Casasanta had no Indiana Jones-type escapes from angry natives or booby-trapped temples. He worked undisturbed in daylight with a bulldozer, posing as a construction worker to become one of Italy's most successful plunderers of archaeological treasures.When he wasn't in prison, the convicted looter operated for decades in this countryside area outside Rome, benefiting from what he says was lax surveillance that allowed him to dig into ancient Roman villas and unearth statues, pottery and other artifacts which he then sold for millions of dollars on the illegal antiquities market.
"Nobody cared, and there was so much money going around," he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. "I always worked during the day, with the same hours as construction crews, because at night it was easier to get noticed and to make mistakes."
The article balances between believing the Italian authorities that their crackdown is working and an admiring profile of Casasanta in his retirement.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:30 AM
The things journalists DON'T tell you
Oh, I'm not complaining about not covering good news from Iraq, but when a painting with enigmatic content sells for $17 million dollars don't you have the obligation to explain the cups and saucers?
Go look at this ravishingly simple Velazquez painting of Santa Rufina. O.K. - the palm is for martyrdom. What's the china mean? I know nothing of her story. The art journalist is all about the price and the return of the painting to Seville (Rufina is a patron of the city).
The Catholic Encyclopedia entry is of no help: "There is no doubt that both are historical martyrs of the Spanish Church." Oh, well - I guess I can give the journo a pass. I'll bet Sotheby's put it in the catalog, though!
For the answer, click on Comments - two people found it quickly and easily.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:17 AM | Comments (3)
July 4, 2007
The Sorrows of an Underfunded National Gallery
It is hard to overestimate the crisis, the hopeless nature of which may have been one of the reasons for Saumarez Smith's surprise announcement in March of his plans to resign as the museum's director. To put it in perspective, the government grant to the National Gallery [London] destined for purchases has been set at zero since 1992. The museum has to look to other sources.Yes, that would drive a director to resignation.
That's from Martin Gayford's article in Bloomberg:Muse, which has some interesting assessments of which of the treasures might be worth taking a pass on. After all, there's even better stuff not on the market yet . . .
Gayford begins by quoting this article on the situation from the Art Newspaper. Together they make interesting reading.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:49 AM | Comments (0)
July 3, 2007
Vikings on the Edge
I noticed an article at 24 Hour Museum (what a great site!) about a loan from the British Library to the Manx Museum - returning the Chronicle of the Kings of Mann and the Isles for an exhibition in the new Viking and Medieval galleries. If you click you can see a not terribly impressive page - but scroll and see the map with the kingdom highlighted (highlit?) on the map. This was one of those kingdoms put together out of isolated bits and pieces - an edge kingdom.
The main part of the manuscript is believed to have been written at Rushen Abbey on the island around 1257 as a look back at significant events in Manx history. Written in Latin, it records the island’s role as the centre of the Norse Kingdom of Mann and the Isles.Several notes taking the Chronicle up to 1316 were later added by the abbey’s Cistercian monks. After the abbey was dissolved in 1540 the manuscript is thought to have passed through a number of private hands until becoming the property of Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection of medieval works was one of the founding collections of the British Museum and are now cared for by the British Library.
The Manx Museum's own site, and their summary of the period covered in the manuscript.
I'm thinking a lot about the Vikings right now - or actually trying not to think so much about the Vikings, because I have other things on my plate that are even more urgent. I'd much rather be thinking about the Vikings - my colleague and I are teaching our Medieval Art & Literature course on them. Let me tell you one thing - there's no book that I've found on Vikings and art worth buying for an undergraduate.
I've looked at a lot of maps lately, and Viking arrangements do have this quality of trickling outwards. The political organizations, at least as abstracted on maps, don't show much sign of interest in coterminous territory. Maybe that's caused by the wandering/trading/raiding pattern of picking up possessions here and there. Maybe it's just an abstraction of the mapmakers - maps of medieval power arrangements are even more absurdly abstracted frozen moments than most other periods. In this case, the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles probably never had the same territory for a whole generation, and only an occasional claim to sovereignty after the first two or three kings. Norse domination, Scots domination, English domination - and still today it's not a part of Great Britain, but a lordship of the Queen, like Sark, I guess.
All in all, the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles will make an interesting 20 or 30 minutes next semester. I guess I can count this blogging episode as course prep. BIG SIGH
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:23 AM
July 2, 2007
The Results of the Transition from Film to Digital - Kodak Implodes (some buildings)
Kodak blew up (blew in?) two of their buildings this weekend.
Here's a photogallery.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:06 PM
BEEEG Mosaic
Oh my! This is a big mosaic project at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC.
The workers will place nearly 2.4 million of the colored glass tiles — each less than an inch in length and width — transforming 3,780 square feet of plain, gray ceiling into a mosaic depicting four scenes from the life of Jesus Christ.The artwork, which will cover the ceilings of the three domes of the basilica, has been 40 years in the making — from gathering donations, drawing up plans and hiring artists. When completed, the mosaics will fulfill the original vision of Bishop Thomas Shahan, who oversaw the construction of the shrine nearly 85 years ago.
. . .
The first mosaic, covering the ceiling of the Redemption Dome, was completed and dedicated in November after about a year of construction. Artists on May 29 began the second mosaic, which is still under construction, on the Incarnation Dome. Work is expected to begin on the third — and by far the largest — dome, the Trinity, after the current project is completed in November.
via Catholic Light.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:05 AM
About that Raphael for sale
In 1968 he paid $325 for a dirty old painting. The reserve price this week 10 million pounds. Click and read an interview with Ira Spanierman - with a photo.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM
June 30, 2007
Shipping costs, too?
PARIS Sir Elton John has won more than £250,000 in compensation after buying fake statues in an antique shop in Paris, believing that they were the works of an 18th-century Italian artist.Harsh!Sir Elton paid $360,000 (£180,000) in cash for four 4ft marble figures of Olympian gods to Jean Renoncourt in 1996. However, six years ago experts discovered that they were imitations. The Paris Court of Appeal also ordered the dealer to pay to ship the fakes back to his shop.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2007
Those Tudors!
In recognition of the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession to the throne Hampton Court Palace is mounting a series of exhibitions. The first one is the Young Henry, including the Katherine of Aragon years. Here's a story (lots of pics) about the show, which sounds like a triumph of smart production.
It explores the first 20 years of his reign by examining the balance of power between the athletic young Henry, his beloved wife, Katherine of Aragon, and Henry's righthand man, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.There's a photograph of one of the late stages - two thrones side by side, a third pushed away. Simple and effective? Too symbolic? I'm not sure. I'd really like to see it, though.Three throne-like chairs, each engraved with a chess symbol, represent these three influential players. They appear in each room in different configurations - side by side, back to back, on opposite sides of the room - a simple and effective way of visually demonstrating first Katherine's fall from Henry's favour, then Wolsey's.
It might be worth pointing out that even as a young man Henry was already a fat boy - if "athletic" is a good adjective for him (it turns up in the story) he was a linebacker or one of those rugby positions that rewards bulk. See the first portrait in the above link. In other words, he was no Jonathan Rhys Meyers star of the new Showtime series The Tudors.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:49 AM
June 27, 2007
Restoration out in the open - Donatello's David
The Bargello museum is going to restore Donatello's David, but they're not going to haul it away to a conservation lab for a decade to do so! Yay!
Here's the Reuters version.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:57 AM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2007
Tapestry Maps
The Bodleian is displaying a set of Tudor tapestry maps - a very interesting example of the Renaissance obsession with cartography. The pictures are very beautiful - go look!
Oxford’s Bodleian Library has reunited a series of rare Tudor tapestry maps after acquiring the Sheldon Tapestry Map for Gloucestershire at auction.The wool and silk tapestry, which cost the library more than £100,000, is part of a set of four maps commissioned by Ralph Sheldon for his home at Weston, Warwickshire, dating from the 1590s.
Illustrating the Midlands counties of England the series features Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. The Bodleian’s new acquisition now rejoins the maps for Worcestershire and Oxfordshire, which were given to the library in 1809.
The maps had not been seen together since being exhibited in the early 20th century. The Warwickshire map is currently part of the Warwickshire Museum’s collection.
[snip]
Each features its county in the centre with a white background and named in red letters, with surrounding counties depicted in various colours. They retain much of their original colour and show landscape features, rivers and townscapes.
I've always loved halls of maps - like the gallery of maps in the Vatican. People have always been interested in the world around them, but the Renaissance had new ways of depicting the world that was more convincing (not more real, just more convincing - like photography is dangerously convincing though still not real). These tapestries would have been a lovely and informative way for Mr. Sheldon to situate himself in his world. Speaking of which I need to get my maps reframed and hung . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2007
Self-portraits from the Uffizi
The always-interesting Waldemar Januszczak has an essay on self-portraits prompted by a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London of self-portraits from the Uffizi. "There is much to enjoy in the parade of deluded popinjays crowding around the end of this show as they go about proving the second great truth of self-portraiture: the smaller the talent, the greater the pretension."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:04 AM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2007
Electronic access to manuscript images
Someday, Lord, someday!
I was running through some medieval links doing iconographic searches today and came across this one I hadn't looked at lately - Liber floridus. So far only two French libraries, but they ARE the Bibliothèque Mazarine and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, so there are about 1600 manuscripts (they claim 31,000 images) indexed and searchable.
Go and try recherche iconographique. I was using the key word (mots-clés) thesaurus and realizing that this kind of thing is getting useful. Thesaurus settings are useful for search engines like this because one has no idea how things have been catalogued, and even if one did one might not know how to spell it in French. So what I was looking for turned out to be "CHASSE ET PECHE" and turned up all kinds of monkeys hunting things - just what I needed!
I'm grateful that the Morgan Library uses the same search engine as my home library, so it's easier to find stuff.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:49 PM
Big Art Gift in the News - two takes
The (London) Times Online ran a story today about the Tate's miss on a major collection of British works (and almost as an afterthought $50 million). The collection went to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Here's the Times story.
Here's the Clark's own press release about the gift.
The collection is on show at the Clark - here's the current exhibition page.
The comments on the Times Online story are pretty interesting - and I tend to agree. The Tate has such a vast collection that another 200 works would seldom if ever end up on the wall. Particularly whiny is the Tate's desire to have any more Turners. What would they do with them? Why?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2007
Walking off with small paintings
In the wake of the disappearance of a small Dutch painting from the Art Gallery of New South Wales an interesting essay about stolen art by Simon Caterson in The Australian. Here's a story with a picture of the picture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:01 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
Modern art in Bologna
What a great name for a museum - MAMBO: Museo d'arte moderna di Bologna. What a great acronym. The link is in Italian. It's about time one of the most important university towns in Italy has a modern art museum.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2007
Art and Death
I've been reading about Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull sculpture with some interest. The Manolo himself sent me a link to the White Cube gallery page - very nicely illustrated! Click on the images on the right to see the preserved shark, among others.
Hirst is a problem. I know people who start to foam at the mouth at the idea that splitting a cow in half and suspending it in formaldehyde is art. I have my moments of wonderment, too - is this art or salesmanship for salesmanship's sake?
I think that Hirst in most of his public statements misses the boat - but then art historians are used to taking artists' statements as no more than a starting point. He keeps saying things like 'I've always adhered to the principle that the simplest ideas are the best, and this will be the ultimate two fingers up to death. I want people to see it and be astounded. I want them to gasp.' (I picked this up here, and I'm not entirely certain where the blogger found it, but it rings true).
What Hirst isn't looking at is the bigger idea of one of the big things art has always been about - survival.
I'm a medievalist. My bread'n'butter course is Art 101: Cave Painting through Gothic. One of my annual jobs is trying to teach beginners that not all art is about self-expression - in fact, art before later modernity is seldom about the artist's feelings. There are lots of things older art cares about - glorifying a deity, glorifying a ruler, decorating a surface, explaining the world. The aspect Damien Hirst should care about, because he's a part of it, is something that is or can be about the artist even when the art is intensely impersonal - and that's survival through the act of making something outside the self.
Though there's not a lot of overt self-expression in ancient or medieval art, the artists have indeed survived so long as we study their works. Damien Hirst, in his habit of depicting death, is cheating death - if only for a little while. Somehow I figure that The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living will have more conservation issues than the statue of Khafre, even though they are remarkably similar works in some ways.
So, do I think the skull is worth fifty million pounds?
Eh - I don't have the collecting gene. But it is interesting. I may lead with it in the fall.
I thank the Manolo for stimulating this little line of thought.
further: Oh - it's not that Hirst is wrong about what it is he's doing, it's that he's inside it. He certainly is giving Death two fingers up. But he's also dealing with Tradition, whether he's interested in that or not. While walking the dog a bit ago I realized that an even better comparison than Egyptian death-cheating-by-art might be to show you one of the plastered skulls from Jericho. Put that next to Damien Hirst's For the Love of God.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:17 PM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2007
Keep shopping flea markets - there are million dollar paintings out there!
Even more so - a million POUND painting. It turned out to be stolen, but hey - it makes a great story. Click and see - there's even a picture.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:42 AM | Comments (1)
May 31, 2007
Flying Greek Statues
How do you get the huge statues in the Acropolis Museum on top of the Acropolis down to the new museum at the foot of the hill? With cranes. Read about it in the Times of London. It sounds dramatic!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2007
$100 Million in Art for Colby?
Colby College, the second-oldest liberal arts college in Maine, received a private art collection valued at $100 million that includes the work of American artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, and others.. . .
The collection consists of 500 prints, paintings, and sculptures that will be housed at the college's Museum of Art in Waterville. More than 80 works from the gift are currently on display at the museum, which is being expanded to accommodate the entire collection.
Oh my - that's a big donation of art to a college museum. Here's the museum's site. Here's a page of works from the donation.
I saw the announcement of a new museum building at some liberal arts college up that way, but I'm not turning it up (the expansion mentioned in this story isn't what I was thinking of, I don't believe). It's not Bowdoin, either, I don't think. Hmmm.*
via Cronaca.
*It is Bowdoin - read here. $20 million museum renovation and expansion - the link thanks to a commenter.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:40 AM | Comments (1)
May 21, 2007
Silly art journalism
If there's ever a place where transcendent values =/= economic valuation, it's the art market. Nevertheless, we read things like this:
Raphael's Medici Valued at Little More Than Warhol's `Marilyn'May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Raphael's portrait of Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici, almost five centuries old, has been priced by Christie's International at little more than a 1962 Andy Warhol image of Marilyn Monroe.
Christie's top estimate for the Raphael at a July 5 sale in London is 15 million pounds ($29.6 million). Warhol's ``Lemon Marilyn,'' showing a purple-faced Monroe on a yellow background, sold for $28 million in New York last week, including commission.
The Raphael valuation shows how art that has survived for hundreds of years is losing ground as new millionaires opt for contemporary pictures.
The article goes on to explain, probably almost of course, that the painting is not an undisputed Raphael and the sitter might not even have been a Medici. So, suddenly, there's some accounting for taste and price.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:55 AM | Comments (2)
May 19, 2007
Airport Blogging, again
Ah, free wireless at the Rochester airport, how I love you!
Off again - this time for a family thing. My parents have been genealogizing in Richmond, VA, and are now at my sister's in NoVa. I'm running down for a few days to overlap with the parents and see the others. Should be fun!
My friend the Artemisia Gentileschi specialist tells me there're Aretmesias at the National Museum of Women in the Arts show of Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque. I might even go, since Dumbarton Oaks is still (grrr!) closed and they have an American Western Art show up at the Philips. Maybe the big Modernism show at the Corcoran? It got great reviews.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:07 PM | Comments (1)
May 17, 2007
Amazing auction prices
At Cronaca I read about some stunning auction prices for 20th century art - over $70 million each for a Warhol and a Rothko. The market is so odd.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 PM | Comments (0)
May 9, 2007
Processional Statues and Carnival Badges
It's amazing what you can find on Flickr if you search! I've spent the early morning coffee time being frustrated in what I haven't found in the world of high art - I've been looking for some paintings or prints of later Medieval or early Renaissance processions with a crowned Virgin Mary. I'm sure they're out there and I'm just being obtuse. I began with our Visual Resources Collection and moved out through a pile of image collections - and then I searched Flickr for similar things under a Creative Commons license and found a procession in Hoboken - JUST what I need. Feel free to come see what I do with it on Friday morning at Kalamazoo!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:28 AM
May 8, 2007
Gladiators!
Gladiators! New images! Go look!
Even the archaeologist admits the picture is pretty poor as a picture, but interesting as social documentation - about the equivalent of someone framing WWF poster, I'd say. And it has a weird connection to Joaquin Phoenix. Or Commodus, as the case may be.
"Commodus was born in 161 A.D.," Frontoni, the archaeologist, said. "The picture covers the floor of a bathhouse built around 130 A.D., and we think the mosaic is the same age of the building, so it was there before Commodus' birth."At the time, the Quintilii family owned the villa. They were friends of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Commodus' father.
"I imagine that Commodus as a child used to visit Quintilii's residence and to admire the mosaic of Montanus. He probably knew and fancied the fighter."
Later, in 182, Commodus acquired the villa after having the Quintilii executed on a trumped-up charge of treason.
I have gladiators on the mind - yesterday I heard a presentation on mosaics showing them, and this shows up on Mirabilis.ca. Must be a sign. And from that presentation I can assure those of you who go look that the weird ruff-looking thing beside the gladiator's head is a weird piece of armor that fits over the left shoulder; it runs down the upper arm and rises up beside the face - and was about the only protection the retiarius, the trident-guy, had.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (2)
May 6, 2007
Procrastination is a Beautiful, Beautiful Thing
Alright. So I should've been writing the final exam for Islamic Art & Architecture (yes, a Sunday exam), but instead I set up a new Flickr group for Gothic Revival. Come join and contribute if you have the right stuff.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:51 PM
May 4, 2007
"What can I do with a major in art history?"
Here's a new answer to an old question - "You can grow up to own a major league baseball team."
MIAMI — It might not seem obvious, but Florida Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria says there are some connections between his job and his college major — art history.Loria, who graduated from Yale in 1962, says a baseball team is built the same way as an art collection.
“The baseball team is about quality. The works of art that I have been involved with, that I have both owned personally and have gifted around the country, are works of great quality. And I think that’s where the two cross,” Loria said Thursday at the Miami Art Museum.
The story gets the name of the artist whose work Loria is donating wrong - it's Fernand Leger, not L Deger (there's something weird going on in the online typesetting, and it happens more than once - I'm supposing there's a diacritical mark gone bad). Still, this is an alternate career path for art history majors.
I had no idea. Loria made all his money as an art dealer.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:22 AM
New Museums - Seattle
The orgasmic Denver addition works surprisingly well as a showcase for some art -- contemporary, naturally -- but the Western collection looks as lost in there as Hoss Cartwright in a wine bistro.That's a great line.
The author is comparing the expanded Seattle Art Museum to the expanded Denver Museum - the piece is worth reading. Seattle got a lot more square footage per dollar, but will get a lot less press because they didn't hire a famous architect this time (the 1990s building was by Venturi, but the new building is by a Portland firm). In a world full of Calatravas and Liebeskinds that's a marketing mistake. However, as the article suggests, museums can be about what's inside them rather than about the building.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:22 AM
May 3, 2007
Art from China
Waldemar Januszczak writes about contemporary Chinese art and explains how and why the stuff that's getting world record prices isn't the good stuff.
What worries me most here is not the stupid amount of money being thrown at low-level art, but the concomitant blurring of reality. Right now, China is involved in an enormous act of international hoodwinking. The entire country is being rebranded: Old China is desperately trying to pass itself off as New China. And this grand global illusion demands that the country be seen as wealthy, creative, successful, tolerant.Luckily for readers of the Times - the London Times - a load of the good stuff is on view at the Tate Liverpool; Januszczak makes it sound really exciting, too, even to someone like me who doesn't much like grim contemporary art.Art’s role in this illusion is to play along with it, and not to rock the boat.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:36 AM
May 1, 2007
Bloggables
I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm regularly blogging things I find at Bloomberg.com: Muse lately. That's more or less Bloomberg's arts (and dining in NYC, mainly - though today there's a review of a restaurant in Dubai) page. They have some sharp folks writing arts coverage for them. Take a look. I find the black background annoyingly retro, but there you go. At least it doesn't look like the woeful NYTimes.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM
April 30, 2007
Cistercians and High Modern Architecture
There is an interesting piece in Bloomberg.com: Muse today by Colin Amery on a new Cistercian monastery in Czech Republic, the first new Trappist community established in former Communist Europe. The article celebrates the buildings, by John Pawson. No pictures.
Luckily, the community has a website! The Monastery of Novy Dur. I start you with the choose-a-language splash page because some of the best photos are there. Sit and contemplate for a while - let the pictures change.
The best information on the monastery's own site about the buildings is under "Benefactors and donors." The best reading is under "Dedication of the church."
In a trampled, dechristianised and secularized country, one would logically expect the foundation of an apostolical convent having a charitable end; and yet we come with a monastery, a church built from the ground up, an enclosure. Certainly, there is an act of faith in this that not everyone can understand. There is even more: our monastic life, which we strive to live poorly and seriously in a western world, pagan in the east as in the west, consists in the unique praise of God and in the intercession for mankind. A limited comprehension but that we know in faith the extraordinary and mysterious extension. The Constitutions of our Order express this even better: a secret and mysterious apostolical fertility.–––
In the context of the actual dechristianisation, one often hears:
The absolute priority ought to be given, even for the religious, to apostolic work, the contemplative work will come after! This might appear to be a reflection of common sense, but in reality it is a shortsighted judgment that translates for the least pusillanimity of faith. We have known and we know what are societies without art, or even worse, with an art imposed by an ideology. They result in a debased, sterilized people. It is the same for the Church without prayer.
Whoops - I did that without linking to the original story that started me off. Here it is.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:26 AM
April 26, 2007
Singapore Art Museum expands
Singapore Art Museum (SAM) | Old Saint Joseph's Institution (SJI)
Originally uploaded by acroamatic.
I spent a happy month in Singapore (gosh - that was almost 10 years ago!) visiting my sister and her family. I made a few visits to the Singapore Art Museum - pictured here - for atmosphere and for art. I didn't realize how recent a renovation I was visiting - the article linked above tells us that the former St. Joseph Institution (a Catholic boys' school) was turned into the SAM in 1996 - it did certainly feel fresh.
I had the feeling in 1999 that Singapore was just beginning to climb on the historic preservation bandwagon. Older buildings were beginning to look very spiffy, which in Singapore meant very spiffy indeed. There were also some moments of Epcotting - recreation of what had been torn down. I forget the name of the neighborhood now (I'm sure a reader - like my sister or brother-in-law will tell us!) down on the river front where shop houses had been recreated, complete with cracks in the plaster work.
The collection at the SAM, what I remember of it, was interesting - lots of contemporary work from SE Asia, especially Indonesia and Malaysia. I believe that was from the permanent collection rather than a traveling show, but it has been almost 10 years.
Happy news for Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:02 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
Let's go to London and steal art! Who'll stop us?
The dramatic scaling down of Scotland Yard's once renowned arts and antique squad has left organised criminals free to plunder the nation's heritage, according to a leading fine art insurer.Well, maybe the leading fine arts insurer is dramatizing a little, too, with "free to plunder." Still, halving the budget for the art theft squad seems drastic.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:03 AM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2007
Kimbell Gives Looted Painting Back, then Re-buys it
For $5.7 million, the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth has reacquired a J.M.W. Turner painting it surrendered last summer to the heirs of the John and Anna Jaffé family of France, after it was proved that the painting had been unlawfully seized by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in 1943.The Kimbell bought it at auction, so there was no deal with the family. Here's the full story in the Dallas Morning News version with a picture. It's one of those to my mind unfortunate Turner landscapes with classically-named stick figures in the foreground. Here's the version at ArtDaily.org - bigger picture. Putti - the painting has putti. Turner was not convincing at Italianate cherubs fluttering around major characters. Oh well - tastes differ.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2007
The Met's Reopened Greek and Roman Galleries
The New York Times has fun interactive graphics and a few great photos of the Greek and (very new) Roman galleries at the Met - go look! I'm looking forward to the real thing.
I had a brief thought last fall about asking the provost for money to take my Roman class down this weekend to see; I still think it would have been fun, but talk about impossible timing. Maybe the next time I teach a classical course.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:41 AM
April 19, 2007
Pantheon Tales
I'm teaching the Pantheon today in Roman Art & Politics. It is the greatest building in the world.
I haven't seen Hagia Sophia yet, and it might be as great, but that's the only contender I can think of.
The Pantheon is a triumph of simplicity and complexity - and my job today is to get them to see both while understanding the fundamental mystery of the building - we don't really know what it was. For such an amazing building there are precious few references to it in surviving Roman writing. Its name doesn't tell us much, because it replaced a previous building called The Pantheon - hence the inscription naming Agrippa as the builder, even though the building we see was built by Hadrian. That's a stumper.
Oh - and I'll address the second thing out of every student's mouth when walking into the building - "I've heard that when it rains the rain doesn't fall through the hole in the roof."
Nope. There's even a drain in the middle of the floor. Sorry.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:57 AM
April 16, 2007
Art Law
I noticed a link from the Art Law Blog - interesting reading over there about deaccessioning (including the Fisk case, which I haven't followed closely enough to blog about - even though an old friend sent me a link to a story in the Tennesseean long enough ago that I really should have). Go read!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2007
The Walton Museum Collects - an Eakins this time
Two years ago Alice Walton bought Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library for the new museum she's building in Bentonville, Arkansas. It's been on loan to the National Gallery in Washington while the new museum in Bentonville is under construction and has just been moved to the Brooklyn Museum for the next few months. She's buying more - and the Crystal Bridges Museum has just announced buying a Thomas Eakins from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. She didn't get The Gross Clinic, the painting she wanted. The University - after considerable outcry - sold it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts this winter.
The Waltons have settled for a second Eakins from the Jefferson collection, a Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand - here's a link to the University's Eakins Gallery page on the painting.
Here's the top page of the Eakins Gallery - they used to have 3 paintings by Eakins, who often gets called things like "the founder of American Realism." The Gross Clinic is certainly an amazing painting (at least in reproductions, whose color balances vary wildly). The price announced for The Gross Clinic was $68 million. No one has admitted the price paid for Professor Rand
From the University's press release:
Brian G. Harrison, Chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees, stated, “It is our board’s ongoing responsibility to consider options that help the institution stay true to its core mission and provide Dr. Barchi with the tools to implement our current strategic plan. Our goal is to make the University an even stronger and more dynamic educational, clinical and research institution, one that cherishes and furthers its history and mission, while also contributing to the economic growth of Philadelphia.”
$68,000,000 + another big pile of money = "the tools to implement our current strategic plan"
I agree with the Board's priorities, though I would never have been able to write a sentence like that without laughing at myself. Why shouldn't it be alright to say something like "We're a medical school, not an art museum. If we can get $100 million dollars to plow into medical education that's more important than the pious preservation in one room of three portraits of mid-19th century professors."
Now we can argue endlessly about timing and about holding on for higher prices - but I fail to see why historical piety should triumph at a medical school. I want doctors who were trained with all the latest toys. I want a cure for cancer. Keep the art in museums.
Should the collection stay together? Well, if you rummage around in the Jefferson University's Eakins Gallery pages you figure out that though the three paintings they held were all by Eakins they weren't painted as a group - this is an accidental collection. Alumni piety might want them kept - I say the Board was right to sell.
Should the collection or any individual painting stay in Philadelphia? Why on earth - unless they raise the money for them. They did raise enough between two institutions and a public outcry to keep one of the three. Should the Elgin Marbles go back to the Acropolis? What is the painting about? The history of art? The history of medicine? Philadelphia in the mid-19th Century? Unless you're going to be an Original Location fundamentalist there's really very little justification not to move art from place to place on the basis of price. As I like to tell my students, the silliest thing about the Italian claim to the Death of Sarpedon krater is that the krater was probably above ground longer in New York City (about 30 years) longer than it was above ground in Italy. You see, it was painted in Athens and shipped to Etruria. Perhaps it was used for a time, but pretty soon (certainly within a generation) it was buried in a tomb. So - maybe above ground in the 6th century BCE for 20 years? Perhaps it was even bought by the Etruscan to be buried, and so was in daylight for a year? So what makes it Italian? Law. That's what makes it Italian.
Here's a Philadelphia blog on the topic with useful animation!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:13 AM
April 12, 2007
My Favorite Church in Rome
I'm in a Rome frame of mine this week. Sometime around NOW every semester - you know, 3 or 4 weeks to go - I get very, very much more interested in something that will happen next year than I am in actually finishing up this year. The combination of flickr play in the last few days and editing my photo collection to clear up some hard drive space had me looking at photos from Rome 2003 and dreaming about Rome 2008. Gosh. Sant'Agnese fuori le mura within striking distance, again. Margaret Visser's The Geometry of Love is out of print. I'll have to teach the church on my own. Not that I mind, really.
I've been in love with this little church since before I knew what it meant. The photo here is inadequate, but it is a start. Let me just point out the purple columns to the left and right of the apse - not the ones holding up the baldachino, but the 3 that show - two left and one right. Yes, there's another one on the right.
You see, the designer chose 4 matching columns from some late antique architectural parts recycling yard in Rome - the Romans were nothing if not practical about their stone - to flank the altar. The rest of the columns on the main level of the building are a serene grey; these four, nearest the altar, are a purple that any self-respecting 7th century Roman would have described as blood-colored to flank the tomb of the martyr Agnes.
Next time I promise i'll take better pictures.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 PM
Speaking of Museums in Paris - look at the Musée d'Orsay!
Speaking of museums in Paris, look at the search engine for the Musée d'Orsay's whole collection! LOTS of images are scanned and I even saw a few links to bibliographies. From the entry page this link is called the Index of works. Though the search engine can be labeled in English, German, or Spanish, the catalog itself is in French. Thus, if you're searching by place name, you search for Londres rather than London.
You can search their collection by Artists, Media, Place Represented (yay!), Character Represented (even more yay!), and Place of Conservation (for scholars, Yay!). They claim it's pretty complete: "The catalogue of works includes all the collections for which the Musée d'Orsay has responsibility, except for the drawings from the Musée d'Orsay collection, kept in the Graphic Arts Dept of the Louvre museum."
Even in the simple search the engine begins to make suggestions in list form as you type - very handy when you're not so sure of the spelling of a proper name (or the French version of a place name). When you see a work - even in the smallest thumbnail, without having to go to the entry for the work - you can save it to your album.
You can get to your album by choosing the My Selection link in the left navigation column (Espace personnel in the French version, which really makes more sense). I was hoping it would let me turn the Derain I selected into an ecard, but it seems one must choose from their (short) list of ecards.
Much more fun in the Espace personnel is the Planning your visit link.
Using the museum plan and the catalogue of artworks, you can plan your next visit by clicking on "Add to your tour" found under each vignette in the search results. The work is then added automatically. You can consult your visit plan at any time and, when ready, print it out by clicking on "print".Please note. The temporary displays of Musée d'Orsay works are changed frequently. Check that the works you wish to see are still on show before you come to the Museum. The location of artworks is updated every morning, before the Museum opens, based on information from the previous evening.
Now that is one of the cleverest features I've ever seen - I very much hope it works!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:34 AM
The Parochialism of the Pompidou
Bloomberg.com: Muse has an interesting essay by someone with the splendid name Jorg von Uthmann on the parochialism of the Pompidou - both its curatorial practice during the just-ended two year hiatus and its overall collection.
It [the Centre Pompidou] is essentially a museum of Parisian art with a token presence of works created elsewhere. As long as Paris was the alpha animal on the international art market, that haughty attitude may have been defensible. Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Dali, Leger and all the other heavyweights of the Paris art scene are here, though not necessarily with their most famous works. After World War II, however, the approach became ridiculous.
Here's the Pompidou's own website, which begins with a nice bit of animation.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:27 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
Charlemagne's Palace Chapel at Aachen
This on the right is pretty much the view of the intended audience - what Charlemagne would have seen from the vantage point of his throne if he looked up at the dome.
The throne sits on the 2nd floor gallery on the west side of the central octagonal core (to the left on the section - click for a pop-up). Charlemagne could walk west from his throne to a window overlooking an large courtyard or could sit on his throne and look up and across the central core at the chapel at the mosaic of Christ enthroned (the parallelism was not lost), around him in the gallery level at his court, or down and across the core to the altar.
The big inscription that I was talking about the other day ran around the cornice (more or less) between the gallery level and the lower level. I'm still looking for a good free photograph of that.
Drawing from Georg Dehio/Gustav von Bezold: Kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Stuttgart: Verlag der Cotta'schen Buchhandlung 1887-1901, Plate No. 40. I found it at the Wikimedia Commons
Longtime readers may be wondering about this burst of images lately - I've been realizing that I can use Creative Commons licensed photos off of flickr but it hadn't occurred to me until this morning that you could search that way! Damn you Alun Salt! That little blogpost of mine on the administrative senior managers overuling marks in the archaeology department at Bournemouth got picked up for Four Stone Hearth XII - a Carnival of Archaeology. I go over there to read the other entries and come across Alun Salt's note on alternatives to stock photography. Alun has a couple of suggestions, one of which is a flickr creative commons search. He uses Delphi. I change the search terms to aachen chapel and come up with 5 great shots, one of which you see above.
So I guess you'll be seeing more pictures. That's not a bad thing.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:31 AM
April 9, 2007
Teaching the Specialty - Charlemagne and me
This week I get to luxuriate in 9th century architecture and art. I decided - entirely selfishly - to spend a day or two in my first-half-medieval-200-level-course with Charlemagne's palace complex at Aachen as the hinge. My students have gotten used to the idea that we jump from coin inscriptions to monumental inscriptions - denarius to apse mosaic - and this will be no exception. The 806 denarius from Frankfurt with KAROLVS IMP AUG (Charles Emperor Augustus) on one side and XPISTIANA RELIGIO (Christian Religion) on the other is a big one for me - and it gets compared in my classes to the dedicatory inscription that ran around the inside of the palatine chapel, where Charlemagne is called princeps rather than emperor. Fun fun fun!
Click to see! This image is taken from Georg Dehio/Gustav von Bezold: Kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Stuttgart: Verlag der Cotta'schen Buchhandlung 1887-1901, Plate No. 40. I found it at the Wikimedia Commons, which has some of the strangest stuff. This plan was first published in 1887 and has to be use with caution. Historians and engravers had a bad habit of regularizing angles that offended them!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:23 AM
April 7, 2007
Contemporary Art in Italy
This is an interesting outcome in the campaign to bring contemporary art to Italy.
After a battle involving money, art and politics, the French billionaire François Pinault has been chosen over the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to turn a much-coveted disused customs house at the entrance to Venice's Grand Canal into a new contemporary art museum.
A Guggenheimist had something snippy to say:
Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, said that the terms of the competition were altered during the process, "so the vision for the Punta della Dogana changed from a dynamic center of contemporary art to a static museum of modern art." He added: "We trusted that the city would share our vision of a dynamic museum, but we were mistaken."
The Venice Biennale is certainly the most important venue for contemporary art in Italy (and the Tadao Ando renovation of the building is to be ready in time for the next one). A almost-former colleague of mine* who specializes in Art Right Now! taught our semester in Rome last year and had trouble scaring up art for her students to look at that she was really interested in (she moved Andy Warhol from the Contemporary to the 20th Century course several years ago).
Someday the Zaha Hadid mega museum in Rome - MAXXI, they're going to call it, Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo - will open, but that someday isn't particularly close. It's been under construction for 4 or 5 years, hasn't it? Here are some pictures from January.
There was a little burst of difference in Italy centered around the Jubilee of 2000 - all kinds of projects that had dragged on for years got finished - and Rome is still looking pretty good. Art historians started telling students that we used to joke about the churches of Sta. Maria sempre chiusa and San Gregorio in Restauro but no more. The EU had changed everything.** Then the new Richard Meier Ara Pacis shell opened three years behind the posted schedule (April 21, 2006 instead of 2003 - I had seen the billboard announcing the 2003 opening and counted on taking my Rome group to see it then. Hah!). Back to normal.
*It's complicated. She's accepted a chair elsewhere, but no one walks away from tenured full professorships into the unknown even when we all expect she will thrive in the new place - so she's actually on leave. I suspect she'll be a former colleague soon enough.
**And the Euro has changed everything, too. Euros have thrown off my bribery skills for handing a 1000 or 1500 lire or so to sacristans to get into locked areas. That was small money, but it was also bills. In Euro that would be pocket change, you see, and THAT feels like a tip rather than a bribe - and sacristans prefer, it's always seemed to me, to be bribed. Very annoying. Bring back the lire!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:01 AM
April 6, 2007
In your Art News of the Weird . . .
MILWAUKEE -- A man yanked down a 17th century oil painting from the wall at the Milwaukee Art Museum and kicked it repeatedly because he was disturbed by the image, officials said Thursday.Was the assailant offended by the triumph of David over Goliath because he himself is a big guy? Are the tattoos relevant?David Gordon, museum CEO and director, said the 1640 work, ''The Triumph of David'' by Ottavio Vannini, was hanging in the museum's Early European Gallery when the incident happened Wednesday afternoon. He said Thursday he was confident they could repair what he called ''serious'' damage to the $300,000 painting.
The work depicts the end of the biblical tale of David and Goliath, with three maidens playing musical instruments greeting David, who carries the severed head of the giant Goliath.
On Wednesday, a 21-year-old Pewaukee man wandered through the galleries for about 3½ hours before he took off his shirt to reveal tattoos -- Chinese symbols of faith, love, hope and peace -- and attacked the painting, Gordon said.
''[He] claims that he was disturbed by the image of the head of Goliath and started kicking it and then he grabbed the painting,'' he said. ''He was a big guy, I think he was about 6-foot-6. . . . He ripped it from the wall and carried on kicking. It all happened very quickly.''
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 AM
April 5, 2007
Forging the Living - always a risk
Well, you try to forge work of living famous artists what do you expect? The artist himself calls Christie's and tells them it wasn't his. "He said that he was “slightly insulted” that someone felt able to reproduce his style, but also flattered at such a “dubious honour”."
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:15 AM
March 30, 2007
The Rotunda and the Lawn
When I was blogging about UVa the other day I remembered that not everyone has a good visual memory ('visual learners' my foot). Google images didn't turn up what I wanted, but a flickr search did. This is from Steve Cholewiak, who kindly agreed to let me upload it to the blog. Click and see his other photos, especially his amazing high definition range photos of a clock tower at Purdue! Ain't the internet great?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:22 PM
March 27, 2007
Another English Spinster Surprises Art Journalists
You'd think these people in this late-feminist age would find unmarried art collectors less surprising - but there you go. Here's a pathologically shy English woman who is leaving her amazing collection of watercolors to the Courtauld in London. Even though the director of the Courtauld had never heard of her it sounds as though the dealer knew her and her mother perfectly well.
Here's my post about the last shocking woman who liked art and surprised the journalists (and her family). She turned out to be far from a shy spinster once I googled her name - but her nephew was working from a very old-fashioned script for 'unmarried British women of a certain age.'
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:20 AM
March 25, 2007
Secret Rome
I'd forgotten about this wonderful website - Secret Rome. Click and see.
And the new site - currently being updated - Secret Italy.
Can you tell that I'm ready to be somewhere other than Upstate New York?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 PM | Comments (1)
Creative Misunderstanding
Working on the paper for this weekend clarified something for me - I think. I think what's going on in the literary tradition of some French farce death-bed scenes is a creative misunderstanding of a long-established iconography (I hate saying 'visual iconography,' but that's what I mean - the art stuff).
My paper was more or less descriptive - a 'hey, look at this as an example of The World Turned Upside Down' kind of job. As I got closer to finished with the paper as it stood I realized that the upside down part was a misunderstanding of the visual material, maybe deliberate maybe not, by the poets.
Now I've got to plow back through my Harold Bloom to remember everything I've forgotten about the anxiety of influence. Not to mention misreading. I started this life as a comp lit guy - and Bloom really is right (well, as close as humanists get to 'right') about this stuff. His taxonomy of misready (see the first link) is very helpful - and art historians have never made as much of it as we should have. Bloom had the misfortune to do all this work shortly before the great tidal wave of French post-Heideggerianism (or late fascist theory - I have a very low tolerance for de Man's apologists) swept everything before it. I teach a seminar on historiography and have wondered about this overlooktion in some detail.
What I've got is a concrete image - a death-bed scene involving a bulging sack - with one clear meaning in high and late medieval iconography and a very different interpretation in the farces. The sack in the pictures is, so far as I can tell, invariably involved with the death-bed of misers and represents their ill-saved gains. The poets play a different game - devils come to capture the soul on its escape from the body in a leather sack - thus taking the presence of demons and sacks and misreading. Rereading.
This is not an uncommon process - it is a very neat example of it. And funny. What more can I want?
Here's the visual tradition - the death of the miser from Moissac, France - c. 1120. Now I think the demon is holding the money bag because he's taking the gold to Hell to melt and give to the miser to drink (i.e., punishment fits the crime). That's mere intuition.
This painting is almost contemporary with the 1496 farce I talked about - Bosch's Death of the Miser of 1485. Be sure to choose the link for details.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:33 PM
March 21, 2007
Albright-Knox Gallery first sale makes $18 million
Well, at least they made a pile of money for their purchasing fund. The Buffalo News version: different pictures. According to the Buffalo News version the estimate was $15 million, so $18 is a good thing. I guess.
Whoops - I read the Buffalo News version too quickly - it's much more helpful. $18 million (in the NYT) is the gross. The gallery's net take was $16.1 million - and that's from only the first 22 of 207 objects and the $15 million was an estimate for the whole process.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:26 AM
March 20, 2007
Just what the public hates about museums - Exhibition Overkill
If I were in NYC any time soon I'd go to the Met to look at this exhibition: Incisive Images: Ivory and Boxwood Carvings, 1450-1800 (NY Times review here - pictures at both links). I love this stuff. I really, really love 14th and 15th century (slightly before this show) ivory plaques. But . . . this is probably a horrific experience, right up there with a long gallery full of Greek vases on shelves.
The key phrase in the Met's own description: "The exhibition of over 100 works . . . ."
Oh. My.
Over 100 small (let's face it, most of this stuff is SMALL) sculptures. In vitrines. In a gallery on the way to the cafeteria.
(Further: Well, you might not hate little stuff in vitrines, but think about this - what is the average height of a museum goer? Or, better yet, what good is it to know the average height of a museum goer if you differ from that curatorial dream figure. There is no such thing as ideal placement for little stuff in a glass case - some of us will have to bend over 100 times and others of us will have to strain 100 times. It's a recipe for uncomfortable viewing.)
One of the terrible problems of museums is that they by their very nature jam together too many examples of things that were meant to be seen alone. That's bad enough with paintings and life-size sculpture, but I find it killing for small, precious things that were meant to be lone objects of devotion or sole conversation pieces. The salt cellars won't be so bad - they were meant to be part of a welter of table goods (think of crowded Dutch table still-life paintings, like this Willem Claesz Heda).
Oh, well. I guess a curator's gotta do what a curator's gotta do - at least she got the stuff out of the storage rooms and onto display.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:18 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2007
Albright-Knox sell-off with PICTURES
I find it very frustrating how much web news coverage doesn't have pictures - I'm sure there are excellent reasons for that, but still!
The stories about the Albright-Knox that I linked to this week didn't have any - and since they were from the local (Buffalo) paper's website you'd think they might have run a picture of the art objects still in local hands. Oh, well.
Here's a story with pictures. Go look at three of the things they're selling. It's a pretty good background story about the sale-as-fundraising-effort, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:01 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2007
New directions at the Corcoran Gallery? Good!
The Corcoran, spared a same ol' same ol' Frank Gehry wing by a fund raising crisis (see my comment from 2005 about that blessing in disguise), seems to be coming along under the guidance of a sensible new director. Paul Greenhalgh is interviewed here about the Corcoran's future. He started by cutting 20 shows from the exhibition schedule. He wants to renovate rather than build (see below). He's actually using his school in a way all too rare at gallery/art school combinations. He's making all kinds of the right noises! Here's an excerpt:
Mr. Greenhalgh also is trying to integrate the school into the museum. Instead of hiring outside exhibition designers, he tapped faculty and more than 50 students to help put up the "Modernism" show and, in doing so, cut costs. Museum curators, in turn, are teaching in the college, including a course on late-19th-century decorative arts given by the director. "We have every intention of creating a seamless institution," he promises.Belt tightening continues under the museum's new chief financial officer, Chris Leahy, who left the Phillips Collection to join the Corcoran last summer. Salary savings due to staff vacancies, a new three-year budgeting cycle and increased donations led to a small financial surplus of about $70,000 last year, Mr. Greenhalgh says.
As for expanding in the future, the director says he envisions a sculpture garden built over a parking garage next to the museum on New York Avenue Northwest. "But our first priority is to lovingly restore the [old] building," he says, pointing to new doors at the 17th Street entrance, cleaned columns in the atrium and a newly gilded grill above the rotunda. "By taking the offices out of the galleries," he adds, "we will be able to add 25 to 30 percent more exhibition space."
The director remains optimistic that the Corcoran can become a stronger, more focused institution, but he admits that won't happen overnight. "My instincts say it will take five years to get all our facility up and running, to restore the building, to turn it around." Stay tuned.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:21 AM
March 16, 2007
Albright-Knox Gallery sell-off permitted
I shouldn't be so negative - just because they're selling MY favorite things to buy more contemporary art - but the Albright-Knox in Buffalo now has permission to sell my favorite things in their collection. At least I suppose they're selling their Egyptian face.
Here's a slightly fuller story from the Buffalo News today.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:00 PM
Where do we go when we die?
Argh!
Help!
Anyone have a nice medieval or patristic theological reference to the soul escaping through the MOUTH?
You see, Heaven and Hell are irrelevant at this point - I'm dealing with the exit strategy and I thought it would be more clear cut. I'm an art historian (waaah!) and hate finding proof-texts in theology, but that's what I'm looking for.
You see, I'm writing a paper. It wasn't really my idea - but a friend of mine wanted to go to a conference and she didn't want to go alone, so she persuaded me to submit an abstract to a conference on Humor & Laughter in Literature and Film being sponsored by the Binghamton University department of Romance Languages. So here I about to talk in public again about something so late medieval that half the books I looked at to write it have "Renaissance" in their titles.
Still and all, it's fun. The low-hanging fruit in humor is the World Turned Upside Down (which has the advantage of being the keynote speaker's topic, so he might come to our session). I messed with literary devils this summer and fall so I pulled out another one - death bed scenes. André de La Vigne wrote a massive play on the life of St. Martin of Tours for production in 1496 (oh my gosh - they knew where America was already. What am I doing?). It had a cast of 200 and took 3 days. Along with the solemn business of the life of Martin de La Vigne wrote a farce (which I'm talking about) and a morality play - the farce served as an entr'acte and the morality was played at the end. I'll mention it in passing.
So there's a death bed scene in which monks say sad things about Martin and Martin says uplifting things about Heaven. Then there's an expiration scene - Martin's soul, in the shape of a dove, flies up to Heaven. Between the two is the farce!
The farce shows how the devils carry the soul of a wicked miller down to hell. It is an inversion (upside down time) of the saint's deathbed. Now what I'm messing with is this - a trainee demon, who has never attended a deathbed, shyly asks Lucifer from what orifice the soul proceeds at death. Lucifer replies "from the backside." So what we see when the death scene takes place is an angel above the bed waiting for the soul and the trainee demon underneath the bed - it is the canonical deathbed scene distorted (turned upside down).
Take a look at Bosch's 1490 version of the Death of the Miser. There's an angel behind the Miser and a variety of demons - but they're lying in wait especially above the canopy.
Or at Moissac in the 12th century - here's a view of the porch.
Here's a detail of the death of the Miser (Dives) scene - go to the center right and see the bed, the miser dying, the weeping wife, and demons above the bed grabbing the little baby, the soul, coming from his mouth.
See my point?
Yes, it's belabored. Welcome to academe. Can I make it last 20 minutes? Damn straight. I don't really have time to drag in literary sources.
So what the Burgundian folk of Seurre, the town that hired André de La Vigne, saw was Martin dying a bona mors, an entr'acte about a BAD death featuring a demon under the bed (oooh - childhood fears?), then St. Martin's good death and a dove flying up to Heaven.
You'd think I could've found what I was looking for in the works of Caroline Walker Bynum, but no. I'm dim. Call it the end of a week off and help a guy out.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:10 PM
Islamic Art in Chicago
Damn - I missed this before break or I would have told students going home to Chicagoland for Spring Break!
I teach a lot of stuff from the David Collection in Copenhagen in Islamic Art & Architecture - if I'd known it was there I'd have gone to see it myself! It's up through May 20th.
Smart Museum (University of Chicago) - Sun-Times story.
No hard link to the exhibitions, but this will work for a while: Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen. The page has a very beautiful Turkish tile.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:45 AM
Walking Out with Little Stuff
Someone in St. Petersburg managed to walk out of the Hermitage Museum with about $500,000 worth of little things of "secondary importance" in her handbag.
An inventory of the Hermitage's holdings revealed last summer that 226 items had gone missing from the 3 million-object collection. Soon afterward, Zavadsky was arrested.The Zavadskys are thought to have stolen 77 of those objects via Larisa Zavadskaya's purse. Most of the stolen items were Russian antiques of secondary importance including icons and decorative arts adorned with gold, silver and precious and semi-precious stones.
Zavadsky insisted during his trial that he had merely sold the items and that his wife had stolen everything herself.
Larisa Zavadsky is said to have died while sitting in front of her computer as the museum inventory got under way in 2005. The official cause of death was heart attack.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2007
Je reviens. . .
I was lucky enough to see The Terminator for the first time in French. You know, in Paris you sometimes have the choice of English and French showings. In Rome in 2003 I got to where I found things in Italian helpful - I saw X-Men in Italian but chose to see Spiderman in English. Who knows. Maybe I was feeling more desperate?
So I'm watching The Terminator now in English.
I think Arnold did his own French dubbing - given the emotional complexity-level of Terminator 1 it isn't all that improbable - and "I'll be back" in heavily accented English is just as good in heavily accented French, for once: Je reviens. There are at least 4 other folks out there somewhere who if they said this out loud in an Arnold-voice would fall down on the floor laughing. I miss 'em. Andy Schwartz, where are you?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:55 PM
February 19, 2007
A New Frame for Washington Crossing the Delaware
Here is a fascinating story about the restoration process for Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware - which is going to take place in its gallery.
“It’s like the boat that was built in the basement,” said Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator of the restoration project, who is manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the museum. “But this is the centerpiece of the American collections.”Among other things, they've found a photograph of the original frame and are building a reproduction.The monumental work by Emanuel Leutze is ranked among the top five artworks in the museum’s visitor-popularity surveys. It is believed that the painting was rolled up to make its original trip to the museum, as it was to fit into its current space for the 1980 opening of the American Wing. The potential for damage prevents the canvas from being rolled now. The scale of the painting’s conservation and reframing, which is to begin later this year, “is unprecedented in the history of the museum, to my knowledge,” Dr. Barratt said. “But it is still very much a research project.”
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:21 AM | Comments (1)
January 11, 2007
New calendars for a new year
No one gave me a calendar this year for Christmas (other than the free ones from charities my parents were shuffling off along with the boatload of compact umbrellas they received this year - an umbrella apiece for me, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my two nephews - and they still have several for their own use). The best part of buying your calendar in January is that they are on sale - and I decided on a calendar of Paul Klee paintings from the Phillips Collection in DC. It has a good mix of paintings I've never seen (January is Figure of the Oriental Theatre, 1934) and things I know and love (The Way to the Citadel, 1937). Flipping through last year's calendar (Charles Rennie Mackintosh paintings, which I bought in part because they reminded me of a recent and happy visit to Glasgow) was a melancholy thing.
Time to move on.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
December 4, 2006
Advent as a Penitential Season
I have no problem keeping Advent as a season of penance - I'd better get credit off of time in Purgatory for grading. December has started badly for me - bronchitis on top of a pile of papers. At least the exhibition project for the first year seminar seems to be in good shape. Some of them were up until 3 last night posting, but the overall exhibition looks good. Now we have to prod them to revise things. It's a pity my colleague and I feel cautious about copyright issues, or we could show you the results - but we're still in the problematic days of a new technology.
My colleague told me on Thursday (I think it was) that the Victoria & Albert in London is no longer charging for academic and non-profit printing of its images - at least its digital ones. Read the report at Cronaca.
Onward through the pile of 101 papers!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:38 AM
November 17, 2006
Fractional giving - Art and Taxes
Here is an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal Taste Page about tax law complications for major gifts to museums handled as planned donations. Read a bit:
Until the Pension Protection Act of Aug. 17, museums could entice donors with a fractional gift. A collector could give his Rembrandt a little at a time, say 20% each year, then take a tax deduction based on that percentage of its value every year for five years. The museum could show the painting for 73 days—20% of 365. If the value of the artwork went up from one year to the next, so would the deduction.But the new law has changed the rules. Deductions no longer increase with value, but they do decline when value goes down. Also, the museum must take “substantial possession” of the object within 10 years. Otherwise the donor must refund his deductions, with interest, and pay a 10% penalty.
Dean Zerbe, senior counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, told the New York Sun in September that the law was changed to stop abuses. “Very wealthy people were taking huge deductions and keeping the art at their homes.”
But one man’s abuse is another’s practical decision. Although entitled to hang a painting for a set period every year, curators might choose not to because it doesn’t fit into their exhibition calendar. In any event, fractional gifts are more about the future than the present, locking in a donor’s commitment during his lifetime so that the art doesn’t go to a rival museum after the owner dies.
That's very interesting! I didn't know that went on. The piece continues by considering deaccessioning-to-buy-more (the Albright-Knox in Buffalo is looking to raise $15 million that way) and the - umm - difficulties of considering some of what museums do as non-commercial or non-profit.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM
November 14, 2006
Lost art found - Fra Angelicos in Oxford?
The Daily Telegraph interviews clueless survivors and misses an interesting story.
Here's a story headlined "Treasures Found Behind Bedroom Door" which entirely misses the point. The paper asserts that two Fra Angelico panel paintings have been found in Oxford and that their owner didn't know what they were because she lived a modest life:
"She bought her clothes from a catalogue, ate frozen meals and went everywhere on the bus," he [the owner's nephew] said.My suspicions were raised by this throwaway line in the story: She had been curator of manuscripts at two universities in America, Princeton and Huntingdon [sic].
Hmmm. Someone who is curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library (not university, silly Englishman) is not a naive. So I googled and read this in her obituary on a page of the Early Book Society Newsletter (click and search for "Preston"):
Jean’s lovely little home in Oxford was filled with treasures: Jean was the largest private collector of manuscript leaves by the Spanish forger, and she owned several important pre-Raphaelite paintings.Miss Preston may have been the twit's maiden aunt, but she's not sounding nearly so naive as to live for 45 years with two Fra Angelico panels without figuring out what they were - the woman collected forgeries! That's someone who is well beyond mildly aware of her collection. I think she reveled in looking at the two paintings for a long, long time without ever having to increase her insurance premium. I salute Miss Jean Preston!
I first read about this at the Commonplace Book of Zadok the Roman.
Further:
About collecting forgeries . . .
There are a couple of reasons Miss Preston might have collected forgeries - I'll speculate here. People who collect forgeries are often interested in conoisseurship - the study of determining who made what by careful analysis of works of art (and the word usually excludes technical examination in favor of the 'trained eye'). Miss Preston was an expert on manuscript books (not necessarily manuscript painting - I don't know enough about her to say) and the Spanish Forger (many of whose works have been detected but who evaded identification, so is still known by the sobriquet - here's a quick link to a work) is a fascinating case. So she must have been interested in conoisseurship! Therefore she would have consulted friends with more expertise in 15th C. panel painting about her own examples (and given her profession and the places she worked she would have regularly met folks with a LOT of expertise).
Now there are two other reasons she might have collected forgeries - they're cheaper than 'real' manuscript pages AND they don't involve dismembering books. She may have developed a taste for a kind of 14th and 15th century ms painting that was beyond her price point. She may well have had a librarians' distaste for people who dismember books to sell isolated leaves, but that's not an issue with forgeries. Therefore collecting (relatively) inexpensive forgeries solves both the ethical and the financial problem.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:55 PM
November 13, 2006
Best thing I saw in DC? Well, it wasn't Shear Madness . . .
Run don't walk to the National Gallery for Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych.
The diptychs are splendid - lots reunited for the first time in years, some artistic divorces presented (panels that have been mistakenly joined by modern collectors and museums), and everything clean and shiny. On a pedantic note, I saw the backs (or exteriors, I suppose) of lots of them for the first time - and even the ones I had seen photographs of are almost always published in black and white. I was thrilled to see them in color! The best exterior? A 5 Wounds of Christ (and now I can't remember its interior). The best topical everyday life detail I'd never seen before? An exterior showing the cell of a Cistercian abbess c. 1500 with a wall clock in the corner!
The show opened yesterday and is up through early February (curses - not through Spring Break!). The Suspicious Cheese Lords, a group frequently promoted by Fr. Jim Tucker, concertized yesterday for the opening. I wish I could have heard them!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:51 AM
November 10, 2006
On the road!
Wish me luck - I'm off this noon-time to DC with 150 students (or so!), 25 of them my immediate responsibility. My folks will be hitting the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the National Galleries. The weather is supposed to be wonderful -- should be fun!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2006
Paris in the Fall
What's up in Paris - I mean, on the walls. A great museum-watcher post from The Rat, friend of La Tushnet.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:54 AM
October 24, 2006
Sorry for the hiatus
I apologize to anyone who missed me, but I ran off to a conference and then had to play catch up.
The conference theme was drama in the Middle Ages, and I fell back on "those who don't do, teach" - I gave a pedagogical paper. It went over well, though - I have a good module for handling the high Middle Ages in European Studies 101.
1. Read Rutebeuf's Miracle of Theophilus
2. Study the north transept portal at Notre Dame de Paris, which tells a slightly different version of the Theophilus legend.*
3. Discuss ecclesiastical administration and organization, homage, written contract, Jews in the 13th century, magic, Hell, intercession and patronage, the role of the Virgin Mary, the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos -- the list, as one says, goes on.
It was well-received in the conference sense and, I believe, in the "ooh - I'm going to try that!" sense.
And I'd like to acknowledge Another Damned Medievalist for her two read throughs.
*sorry for the link to someone's flickr site, but I'm queasy about posting copyrighted pictures and am having trouble doing better.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:43 AM
September 22, 2006
Preconceptions.
I'm someone who believes in truth - what can I say? A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad - and I'm watching Hud tonight.* The cinematographer was someone named James Wong Howe. That struck me as an interesting fact (yeah, yeah - truth?) for 1963. What's someone with the middle name Wong doing in 1963 as the cinematographer for a Larry McMurtry movie? IMDB shows me this list.
Did you know that someone born in Guangzhou in 1899 would be involved in a list of American films starting in 1923? That's a biography worth reading.
Funny Lady.
The Molly Maguires.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Hombre.
Hud.
Bell Book and Candle.
A Farewell to Arms.
Come Back, Little Sheba.
Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House.
Confidential Agent.
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Fantasia.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The Prisoner of Zenda.
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
And those are only the ones I've seen! This shifts my idea of "what Hollywood was like."
*SUCH a beautiful movie! Made me postpone my latest Netflix arrival. Patricia Neal is . . . way too great.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:05 PM | Comments (4)
August 18, 2006
Big Architecture - Hadid at the Guggenheim
If there's a Most Important Living Architect right now I guess it's either Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid. The Guggenheim has a big show on Hadid up through late October (you know, THE Guggenheim, as opposed to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice or the Guggenheim-Bilbao [designed by Gehry, by the way] or the Guggenheim-Soho or the Guggenheim-whatever-they-decide-to-do-next).
Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize in 2002 (Gehry in 1990). She has practiced as an architect, but seems to mainly have made her living before the late 90s as a professor of architecture (and still held a teaching position in Vienna when she won the Pritzker). This means that she's one of those folks who didn't build much of the work that made her famous. Her first building in the rain, seen over and over in the show, was a firehouse for a factory complex in Germany. Most of her built work seems to be in Germany - she didn't win a commission for work in England (where she seems to lived for most of her adult life) until after the Pritzker. The only building she has completed in America is the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (though there were some references in wall text to a house in Los Angeles that is perhaps under construction). Now she's building skyscrapers in Dubai.
Here is the link to the highlights from the show.
This trajectory - getting famous despite never getting the job - seems pretty normal for late 20th century architects. I'm never sure what I think about it. Are they really rejected because they are too avant-garde, or because their buildings are simply impractical? I've talked to two architect friends (one of whom likes her work very much and one of who dislikes her work at least a little). We all agreed that we want to hear from real users. The video shot in the BMW headquarters in Wurzburg (the building I liked the best) was far too self-congratulatory and corporate-public-relations massaged to take very seriously as an evaluation of how the building works.
Her main idea in that building seems to have been to break down the hierarchical division between manaqement and line workers by putting them in one building and indeed running the assembly line overhead through the management space - so the production workers can never be out of sight of the white collar workers. Not in a supervisory (or Foucaultian scopic) way, but in a forced-presence kind of way. Maybe. We'll see. Come back and ask in 15 years and see what they've changed.
I dislike Brutalist exposed concrete. I really do. There were people on video ooohing and aaahing over the beauty of the concrete in one of her buildings. I used the Paul Rudolph chapel at Emory regularly - it was gorgeous, as poured concrete goes. But still - the eternal grey is deadening, and would be worse in Northern Europe than in Atlanta, I'd expect. Here's a nice article about the chapel from an Emory site. Here are some better pictures.
The exhibition was very interestingly handled - we spiral up the Guggenheim's great ramp and see ZH chronologically. Since she didn't build much in her early career what we start with are really very nice large scale abstract paintings that she used as conceptual models. Then we slowly wind our way up past less abstract computer renderings, then paper modelling (folded and cut paper reliefs as wall-hangings) of some buildings that ARE built. By that point I began to be able to understand what she was doing. I don't necessarily like it any more, but until the 3rd level of the ramp I didn't really understand what the buildings were supposed to be like. Next came actual 3-d models, things that a client might have been able to use to make a decision. Eventually we got photography and video of built work. The final room was her latest version of the paintings - a digital imaging technology of silver prints - very cool and elegant.
There was no investigation of collaboration - we have no clue at the end of the show how many people work for her practice (it's obvious she isn't doing all this herself) or even who she worked for before she went out on her own. The show is all Zaha Hadid all the time - a classic example of the deification of the Most Important Architect.
I will not link to Hadid's own site - her Flash introduction has locked up my computer twice -- one of the best examples I have ever seen of Architect Totalitarianism. You WILL watch her face decompose in Flash forever, or until you restart your computer.
From the same trip - The Cloisters, part I
- Making discriminations at the Frick
- Dada at the MoMA
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:44 AM
August 16, 2006
MoMA Dada
Out of order and almost a week late I'm getting back to my exhibition reviews!
The Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art (already exhibited in Paris and Washington) is amazing. Wonderful. Splendid. Fun! I've been telling friends that absolutely everything I ever taught from Dada with one exception was there - they didn't have The Bride tripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.* Yeah, yeah, Duchamp was thrilled when the glass broke the first time, but I bet Philadelphia never loans it out.
Still and all, they had amazing amazing stuff. I had more than one instance of scale shock - that feeling people who live with reproductions get when we turn a corner and see something smaller or bigger than we've always thought. Yes, we could read the fine print in the caption that gives the dimensions, but it doesn't always sink in. My strongest one at this show was Hannah Hoch's Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany. Somehow I'd always thought of it as about the size of a sheet of typing paper. Nope. Poster size. I was stunned. I went back to it two or three times.
I saw so many favorites! One from MoMA's own collection, Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, used to appear as an essay question on tests regularly when I taught 19th and 20th century regularly (yes, in the far-off Agnes Scott days when I was the pickup adjunct and taught whatever they wanted). The question usually went something like: Look at the work. Write down the i.d. information. {they were supposed to have memorized this one} Look at the work. Read the title. If you got the i.d. right, tell me what's Dada about it. They got bonus points if they compared it to Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages (which I didn't notice in the show - the exhibition was THAT big).
I have seen rotoreliefs from Duchamp, but they had a rotating machine (not illustrated anywhere I can find it) that made conical illusions. There was an axle mounted on a motor; sections of black and white something (glass? wood? I don't remember and have lost my notebook) mounted at intervals along the shaft. One stands in front and stares as it rotates and makes one perceive a cone! Great fun! And BIG! There was a whole Rrose Selavy zone (everything from the Man Ray photo to Why not Sneeze? - you know, the rediscovered arms of the Venus de Milo). He was every bit as brainy as we all think.
The craftsmanship of a lot of the work surprised me. Perhaps it doesn't make sense, but just because you're criticizing the world of high art it doesn't necessarily mean that you do sloppy work. There were some unpolished passages (Schwitters Merz pieces, anyone?) but in general these people really were serious about their craft. I was pleased to learn that.
I apologize for the links - the show is not well-illustrated online. For instance, the MoMA site has a link to some items from the show that are in the MoMA collection (the link says 'highlights), and there's something similar on the National Gallery version (down and on the right - you have to click on individual artist names). The site from the Paris version seems most interesting.
So why do I like Dada so much, I the medievalist? Well, it's because I'm not a classicist, however much I teach it. I prefer Romanesque sculpture to Gothic and Carolingian painting to Romanesque. I like conceptualism more than naturalism and firmly believe that the adjective 'slavish' should never be far away from the latter. Dada has its problems -- I'm not in favor of rebellion for the sake of rebellion, after all. I am in favor of rebellion against the religion of art -- whether that of the 19th century academy or the late 20th century blockbuster. And anyone who draws a mustache on the Mona Lisa, instead of turning her into a portrait of the Magdalen, is a friend of mine.
The show is open for less than another month - so hurry! I'd go again if I were in NYC.
*now here's CRAZY. The Philadelphia Museum doesn't have the Bride Stripped Bare available online - but they do have the 1913 Bride. Don't believe me? Go here and search for yourself.
From the same trip - The Cloisters, part I
- Making discriminations at the Frick
- Zaha Hadid, Famous Architect, at the Guggenheim
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:02 PM
August 12, 2006
Reynolds and Gainsborough....
Reynolds (see Lady Skipwith) is a better painter, but I like Gainsborough (see Mrs. Baker) better. That's what museums like the Frick are for!
From the same trip - The Cloisters, part I
- Dada at the MoMA
- Zaha Hadid, Famous Architect, at the Guggenheim
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:42 AM
Museuming around...the Cloisters
I have the loan of an apartment in Jersey City for a week (thanks, Jeff!) so I'm down here saturating myself. I'm way behind on bloggery!
On Thursday I took the A Train to the Cloisters -- my favorite museum in the world, probably. This was the first time I've been in good weather and alone - so I spent about 3 hours there! Gosh it was pretty and the café was open (in one of the outdoor cloisters).
I hate it when people ask "what's your favorite painting" (or some such). Here are a few of my favorite works from the Cloisters:
Here's an introduction to the Cloisters.
The book of hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, painted by Jean Pucelle. The page that I got to see showed the Entombment of Christ and the Flight into Egypt on facing pages.
The cloister taken from Saint-Michel de Cuxa. Some of you may have noticed that I have little patience with historical preservationism. This is one example of something I don't mind that drives the preservationists NUTS - disassembling a building and moving it, reassembling it into a pastiche. Big deal. It was in ruins, people. It hadn't been a working monastery since the French Revolution, if not before that. This is not to say that some of the robber-baron transplantage of European art to America wasn't a tad underhanded (I've read stories of Bernard Berenson and Duveen buying in Italy for the Kress Collection that are hair curling), but please!
The Saint-Guilhem cloister. Some of these capitals are amazing! I'll post some pics of the Hell-mouth capital. Very instructive!
Yes, I love the Unicorn Tapestries - who doesn't? I had a really fun conversation about hidden symbolism with a student from the Savannah College of Art and Design who saw me drawing capitals in the Cuxa cloister. He has a pretty good eye for detail (and could, of course, draw better than me).
Of course most of my favorites aren't on the website, so you'll just have to go look for yourself!
From the same trip
- Making discriminations at the Frick
- Dada at the MoMA
- Zaha Hadid, Famous Architect, at the Guggenheim
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:00 AM
August 10, 2006
Busy busy
This is a placeholder - I'm not feeling very blog-motivated - I'm in New York City (sort of) for the week and am museuming about. So far MoMA and the Cloisters. Lots to say! Tomorrow the Frick and the Met!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:14 PM
August 4, 2006
Great documents available online
The Domesday Book goes online from Britain's National Archives! I like their Archives tagline - "Documents Online - dowload your history."
This is not designed to be a pretty presentation of a pretty book, but a thorough presentation of a complex book. The interface is appropriately complicated, but clear enough.
Brief note in the Guardian, which is where I noted it. Odd, they don't provide a link to the online book!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:30 AM
July 26, 2006
Novels and Plays - different skill sets?
This an interesting essay, prompted by a revival of James Joyce's only play, on why novelists generally write such bad plays and so few dramatists write good novels. The author is a novelist, so take it as you will.
I don't know if I've ever read a treatment of the visual arts that considers reasons other than patronal or sociological (women not being allowed to study from the nude explaining why women didn't do history painting, Impressionists being bourgeois explaining their choice of subject matter, commissions driving altarpieces or portraits) for some of the differences between artists. I'm sure that scale is an important consideration - some people like to make big things, some people small ones. What about media? Some media are finicky, some looser. Do some archtiects really prefer houses to larger commissions? Of course they do.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:47 AM
July 23, 2006
da Vinci Code
Talk about a waste of two and a half hours! I just went to the da Vinci Code at the Smith Opera House (a 2nd run theater, so I only paid $5). It was as bad as I'd heard - though my colleague Elena Ciletti is right that the scene of the bishops screaming at each other at the Council of Nicaea is almost worth the price of admission. And concessions are cheap at the Smith, too.
Sad sad sad, if anyone takes that kind of tripe seriously enough that his or her 'faith is shaken.'
And if you know someone for whom that's true, send 'em a copy of De-Coding Da Vinci, by Amy Welborn.
Gosh! I don't know what offended me more - the Chick Tracts view of Constantine or the idea that Isaac Newton and the Catholic Church had anything to do with each other. The conflation of the Inquisition and the Witch Hunts? The 'art history'? Oh - I don't know. Tripe. It wasn't worth sitting through even to see what all the fuss was about.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:51 PM
July 19, 2006
Digital Libraries...
Here's another digitalization project - this time a Digital Abbey Library of St. Gall (Codices Electronici Sangallenses). Best of all, they're allowing non-commercial reproduction on the web, so long as there is an explicit bibilographical reference and a link back to the digital library!
Here's a good description of the project - they have about 100 out of about 2,100 manuscripts digitized now.
You, readers, might have wondered why I, an art historian, use so few images on my blog. Copyright. That's why. I'm moderately sensitive to the horrific issues of copyright, and it's easier not to tread those paths.
This kind of collection will help!
Here's one - a cross-carpet page from an 8th century Gospel book.
Cod. Sang. 51, page 6, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen / Codices Electronici Sangallenses).
Sorry, the descriptions (and even some of the labelling) is in German even after one chooses the English options. Oh, well - everyone should learn German, anyway!
One of the neat things about this kind of online resource is that all too often we art historians only show students the pretty pages - the ones with good pictures. I was in graduate school before I realized how few pages in medieval manuscripts had any decoration at all! But you see, slide collections are that way, too - we tend only to own slides of the pretty pages. So what I can do with this sort of online resource that provides facsimile photographs of complete books is choose a book I know has some decorated pages and move through it on the big screen page by page -- and the students will see what a small proportion of book pages are decorated!
What fun!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:11 AM
July 18, 2006
Ronald Lauder finds my price point.
For me it is not worth $50 to see 5 Klimts during special hours. That's easy enough.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on Klimt where you can see the painting driving all the silliness.
Update:
How nice to see I'm not the only one. The Neue Gallerie has given up on their silly idea to charge $50 for a 5 painting show. Someone must've pointed out that the mega in megashow means big - and 1 stupidly expensive painting doesn't constitute a blockbuster. Here's the New York Times coverage of their backdown.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:36 AM
July 10, 2006
Earthworks Art Gallery, Geneva
I promised a photo of the new art gallery on Exchange Street - here it is!
The sculpture out front is by Sam Castner.
Here's my post on the opening.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:07 AM
July 1, 2006
Geneva update - July Art Opening
For those of my readers who care about Geneva (and I know there are at l least three Geneva natives who read and comment on occasion) you might find it interesting that Bibliochef and I spent this evening at an art opening on Exchange Street - Earth Works Art Gallery of Penn Yan has opened a gallery in Geneva. I'll put up a picture of the double-store front (429 Exchange Street) tomorrow - I forgot to take my camera!
Here's a page linking to the show - 5 Graces. The show was of mixed interest, though I liked a lot of the sheep by Diane Whitehead (sorry - no sheep on her page). Bibliochef liked her roosters. We both rather liked some cows and bison.
We also liked some of the sculptures (again, not the ones pictured - isn't it always the way?) by Sam Castner, including a big iron sphere out on the sidewalk. Yes, public art for sale in Geneva! Castner was the only local artist on display (and they were using him as floor filler, really, since the 5 Graces are all painters). I think someone announced him as a co-owner of the gallery, too.
Not the usual Saturday evening in Geneva - and all the better for it! A few free glasses of Anthony Road winery Pinot Gris and Vignoles didn't hurt, either.
Click here on the Upstate New York category to the right if you want to see other things about Geneva . . . .
Click here if you want to see a photo of the gallery.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:31 PM
June 26, 2006
Outhouses as Protest Art
In protest, they've erected multicolored outhouses along county roads and the main streets of the county seat, Berkeley Springs. They've called for a moratorium on big development. One weekend this month, they rallied before Farnham's backyard titans to repeat the mantra, "Keep Morgan County Rural. Keep Morgan County Green."Here's a Washington Post story about anti-development protest with an outsider artist twist. Well, sorta. Outsider to the extent that I'm not sure I'd get out of my car to see the main subject's statues. Hippy art? He's the son of a lawyer, raised in Scarsdale.
I guess the lesson is you can't move away from suburbia - it will come and get you!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:50 AM
June 5, 2006
Complexity
Last night I watched Hero on the recommendation of a colleague (and reader - stop procrastinating!). We're considering using it for a course next year - and gosh it's certainly beautiful. I was not in the best mood for it, though - by 11:30 p.m. I was ready for everyone to die once and for all and to stop shilly-shallying about their story lines. In retrospect, though, I see it's a great example (and such pictures!) of some of the things we're looking for - especially narrative complexity.
I'd recommend it, but next time I'll start the DVD earlier.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (2)
May 27, 2006
Gothic Revival exhibition in New York
File under "things I'd go see" -- an exhibition of American Gothic Revival work (including lots of furniture) at Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Revival styles fascinate me - I'm still fiddling with an article on an Upjohn building here on campus and its later modifications.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:43 AM
May 16, 2006
Oh my!
Sorry to have left my garden uncultivated! I've been busy beyond even my usual busyness for early May - 4 days at Kalamazoo isn't exactly a mistake, but it does make it difficult to finish strongly!
Oh, well, I'm back on track. This was the first weekday of summer and I did work! Yay!
Graduation was dry! Yay! Not beautiful, but not what was predicted.
I'm headed upstairs to the balcony grill a little steak and local asparagus (it's turned out to be too nice an evening to stay inside) and read William Diebold's Word and Image again. I'm going to try to use it in my Art 270 next spring (early medieval, more or less) and I really ought to reread it. Pricey for such a slim volume, but it is good. He deals clearly with lots of the issues that I wish most for students to learn. He strudctures the book around Gregory the Great's defense of images and its partial success in the West - and its failures. He ends with a really well-done exploration of a single object - the reliquary-statue of Ste. Foy of Conques. Here's the later church dedicated to her.
You know, the pretorn, prewashed salad may be one of the great innovations of recent years. I am eating much more salad because of it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:17 PM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
Expanding Museums
Oh my - go look at the pictures of the expansion of the Morgan Library by Renzo Piano. It reopens late this month. I'm planning to go with a friend this summer (whether we get a little grant for it or not!).
Piano is one of the architects who makes Modern work, especially (I suppose, because I've never been inside anything else he's done) museums.
While they were closed the Morgan folks got their online research tools into great shape -- Corsair has to be one of the best portals to a fixed collection I've ever used. Admittedly, Corsair focuses on a field I know reasonably well and a collection I know a little bit about, but the design is clean and effective. Medievalists should give it a try!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:58 AM
April 9, 2006
Fountain Pen Fraud
I look forward to the commentary at Cronaca on the below the fold front page weekend Wall Street Journal (sorry, I'm a print subscriber, so I can't read it online myself without additional payment - grr!)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:30 AM
April 5, 2006
Academic Gifts
The offer of a major -- $200 million -- gift to NYU for the study of the ancient Mediterranean (more or less) has brought out lots of the usual snarls between the those who dwell in the empyrean realm of academe and the collectors. The usual accusations of "you just want to rip everything out of the ground and put it on display" and "you just want everything left in the ground until YOU get to dig it up and study it" come forth. Been there, heard that, but it's always instructive. Though easy to mock, these are real issues.
The best unconsciously funny line is this one:
The history surrounding the Levy-White collection and White’s collection practices make NYU’s decision to accept the funds and create an academic institute that might share or promulgate her views troubling, said Randall White.Let's all start by admitting that donors' intentions have very little to do with what goes on at funded institutions, even in the initial generation of funding. As soon as the first directorship turns over it all falls apart. Stories like that of the Menils in Houston don't come along often (give lots of gifts to the University of St. Thomas, fall out of love with UST, BUY the art library back from UST and transfer it and a number of faculty members to Rice...wacky!). According to the story at Inside Higher Ed several universities have decided to remain in the realm of ideas and not taint themselves with the money. NYU is willing to take it.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
December 23, 2005
Winter and Christianity got you down?
So - here you are a nice non-Christian who quails even at 'happy holidays' -- what do you do? And baby, it's cold outside. Well, you could go to the Brooklyn Museum and look at what synagogues had on their floors in the 7th century of the so-called "Common" era (such denial!). I'll be going soon, but then it's my period and I love the interaction between the early synagogues (though this isn't really so early) and early church architecture. Sadly, the link isn't very picture rich, but if it stops even one person from believing that pre-modern Jew's didn't decorate using figural art, it's a start.
Twelve of the mosaic panels that will be on display were part of the sanctuary floor of the synagogue in Hammam Lif, Tunisia (the ancient Punic city of Naro, later the Roman Aquae Persianae), the primary subjects of which are Creation and Paradise. The Latin inscription on the floor panels indicates that Julia of Naro gave the floor to the community. Two menorahs flank the inscription. Included are depictions of a tree in Paradise, sea animals and birds in a scene portraying Creation, and symbolic birds and baskets that relate to the themes of Creation and the coming of the Messiah. Decorative motifs include birds and fruits. The remaining nine panels come from other rooms in the building and other nearby buildings. They depict animals, a male figure, and a female figure.
That one's a zombie error as persistant as "Muslims don't depict Muhammad," and as hard to kill, depite the enormous pile of data I can hand students. Another nice touch about this one is the inscription crediting a female donor, cheefully undercutting lots and lots of assumptions about the "status of women" in Judaism or Late Antiquity. Repeat after me: there is no such thing as 'the status of women' -- there are differences between being an elite woman and any number of types of non-elite woman. That's the entire theme of my "Women and Art in the Middle Ages" course; despite primary and secondary reading and class discussion it sometimes doesn't penetrate the all too modern mind of some students.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:03 AM
November 12, 2005
Images of the Prophet Muhammad - a Zombie Error
So - are images of the Prophet Muhammad illicit in Islam? From what some people do and say you might think so.
Not so fast. This is a classic zombie error - a commonplace belief that will. not. die!
I am not a specialist in Islamic art, but I teach an occasional low-level survey of the field at these Colleges, where we have an excellent Visual Resources Collection for a school of our size, a collection which is unfortunately for your visual delight very observant of copyright laws, so I can't post any pictures. I popped some terms into the search engine and came up with this list of paintings of the Prophet Muhammad executed by Muslims that we happen to own slides of; this is not an exhaustive list!
So, journalists, don't tell us this is a taboo subject matter in Islam. The physical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad may be a taboo subject matter in some sects of contemporary Islam, but let's all be clear -- this is not a universal prohibition.
Here are LOTS of examples for you arranged in chronological order:
From Rashid al-Din's Jami al Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) - here's a page from the Met (with pictures) explaining some history of the book.
-----Khalili Collection Ms 727, Rashid al-Din's Compendium of Chronicles, f3a: Muhammad conquers Mecca, 1314, painted Iran.
-----Edinburgh University Library MS Arab 20, Rashid al Din's Compendium of Chronicles, Scene of the Birth of Muhammad, 1315, painted Iran. The baby Muhammad has a visible face. Here's a link to an image of ONE folio, though not one showing Muhammad.
---Topkapi Sarayi Library, Istanbul, B.282 Kulliyyat-i Tarikhi of Hafiz-i Bru, folio 171A: Muhammad Conquers Mecca, 1415-1416, painted Afghanistan -- Muhammad's face is a golden wash of fire and he stands in front of a gold background. F 169A shows Ali storming a fortress.
---Topkapi Sarayi Library, Istanbul, MS Hazine 2154, F 107:Muhammad describing Jerusalem, 1400-50, painted Iran -- FULLY FACED Muhammad.
---Paris, Bib Nat, SupplTurc 190, Hari-Malik Bakhshi, Mi'rajnama, folio 34B: Muhammad and the Angel Gabriel, 1425-50, painted Afghanistan. Fully faced Muhammad, both Muhammad and Buraq encased in flames.
---Khalili Collection MSS 620, The Giant Uj* and the Prophets Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, 15th Century book, painted Iraq - click this link, choose Publications, choose Vols XXV-XXVI, scroll down - it's the image in the left margin. I can't find the folio information without going to our library and the Khalili collection doesn't allow access to pages deep in the directory. Sorry.
---London, British Museum. Mi'raj, 1497, painted Iran. The thumbnail image I can see looks like a fully-faced Muhammad, but it won't enlarge and I'm not sure.
---Worcester Art Museum, page from a Khamseh of Nizami, Mi'raj, Muhammad on Buraq, 1550, painted Iran. Here's a link to a page from the book, but like the Edinburgh link not to the correct page. It begins to make me wonder if the curators are avoiding controversy by keeping the Muhammad images off the internet?
---Freer Gallery, Washington, Jami, Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones), F 275A, Mi'raj, Muhammad on Buraq, painted Iran, 1556-65. Go here, scroll to Arts of the Islamic World, choose the last virtual exhibition -- your tax dollars at work!! Choose the first poem of the 7 - "Chain of Gold." The Ascent of Muhammad (the Mi'raj) is the 4th page in. There's a nice note on the use of the veiled prophet (anyone from St. Louis reading? That's where it comes from.).
---Topkapi Sarayi Library, Istanbul, MS.Hazine 1221, Kitab Siya-i Nabi (Life of the Prophet), multiple scenes from the life, including the Birth, Call by Gabriel, the Call to Prayer from the top of the Kaba, the Mi'raj, and the Death of the Prophet, 1594, painted Turkey.
Some other useful things
Here is a useful piece on the Night Journey of Muhammad, the Mi'raj, from Wikipedia. Perhaps its explanation of the mystical content will help you understand why this is such a common IMAGE of Muhammad.
The Wikipedia article on Buraq, the steed of Muhammad, even has a picture optimistically described as "public domain." I don't recognize it (it's not a great reproduction and, like I said, I'm not a specialist). It shows a veiled Muhammad.
*Uj is, I think, Og of Bashan in the Hebrew versions.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM
November 9, 2005
Mmmmm, Memling! Museums in New York...
I went to two big shows in New York City this last weekend - the Fra Angelico show at the Met and the Memling portraits at the Frick. I can cheerfully recommend the Memling show for scale, focus, and interest. Tastes differ, but if you really prefer Italian early Renaissance you'd find 20 Memling portraits more bearable than if you preferred Northern Renaissance and were confronted with tiny panel after tiny panel of the Blessed Angelico's work (75 paintings and drawings).
The two shows provide a really obvious contrast for people who are interested in the effect produced by hanging similar works in dissimilar spaces. The Frick has the Memling show of 20 works about the size of a sheet of printer paper is in two small rooms -- the show is downright intimate. The Fra Angelico show, 75 works of about the same dimensions (there are a FEW larger works, central panels of multi-part altarpieces), are in a huge space -- the lower floor of the big Robert Lehman pavilion octagon.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:41 AM
October 11, 2005
What I saw at the Met
Here's a page of some of the Met's black and red figure vases. In the reinstalled Greek rooms (the Hellenistic and Roman rooms are still being rebuilt and don't open until sometime in 2006, I think) there is now more emphasis on metalwork, but pride of place still goes to their pottery. There's no question that the painters of the 6th and 5th centuries were amazing draftsmen (GOSH I love Exekias), but it is increasingly clear that the potters and painters were producing middle-class table ware in imitation of things like this bronze water jug. It's useful that the Met is now showing more of their excellent collection of metalwork, and helpful that they're making more explicit references in the wall text to the relationships between the two.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:12 PM
October 10, 2005
Midterm Break
Sorry to have been so lackadaisical about posting - I'm just back from spending most of midterm break in New York City. I finally ponied up the money to join the Met. I spent the whole time in the Greek rooms (not the Cypriot stuff upstairs, the Greek rooms) staring at the vase paintings. Usually I like sculpture more than vase paintings, but to be honest the Met's collection of small stuff is better than their Greek statuary -- the New York Kouros aside.
further: Click on the kouros link to see an odd photographic effect. Some objects don't look true-to-scale in photos; I'd never noticed it about the NY Kouros, but there you go -- it looks quite small in the Met's own photo. The statue is more or less life size but the photo makes it look smaller. Interesting. Go to this page and look at the 3 statues. The single figure is the kouros (Greek, "young man") - approximately 77 inches (6'5"). The two groups are both miniatures -- a 4.5 inch bronze of a man and a centaur and a 5.5 inch high ivory plaque of two women.
Why have they carefully photographed them to obscure the scale?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:29 PM
August 31, 2005
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh is a great place to start a course in the Foundations of European Studies. One can argue about the Mesopotamian relevance (though I don't - it's as reasonable a place to start as any) to "Europe," but the work is so very grand! One of the best things about it is that even callow first year students with backwards ball caps (well, until I ask them to remove them) is that though this story is really OLD when first written down (if he's historic, Gilgamesh is sometime around 2500 B.C.) it's as sophisticated as anything they're ever going to read.
One of the constant themes of my teaching is that they can't let time make them underestimate people -- just because they didn't have electricity doesn't mean they were "stupid" or "worse" or some such. Life was harder in physical senses, but I try to convince my students (in every class, every semester) that in psychic senses life hasn't changed. Life is hard.
“Gilgamesh, though he was king,/Had never looked at death before.” Isn't that always one of the difficulties of the callow young (though it's not at all clear that Gilgamesh is young, only heedless)? And then there's this:
All he had to give was being weak and rage
About the kings and elders and the animals
In the underworld that crowded sleep,
About the feathers that grew from his arms
In the house of dust whose occupants
Sat in the dark devoid of light
With clay as food, the flutterings of wings
As substitutes for life.
The priest and the ecstatic sat there too,
Their spirits gone, each body like an old recluse
No longer inhabiting its island.
Like shells one finds among shore rocks,
Only the slightest evidence
Of life survived.
Makes you wish you could read Sumerian and Akkadian, doesn't it?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM
August 8, 2005
Neat Late Antiquity Blog!
I forgot this one in the Carnivalesque listings -- I came across Troels Myrup Kristensen's Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm sometime last month and had misfiled the bookmark. Kristensen is a graduate student at the University of Aarhus and the blog tracks the course of the M.A. thesis on early Christian iconoclasm of non-Christian (pagan, that is) art.
The Case Studies category is especially interesting -- and the pictures are even more so.
One of the interesting issues will be sorting out the dating accurately enough to be certain that what shows up is Christian iconoclasm rather than Islamic iconoclasm (something that certainly went on as well). It's also tricky to separate accidental damage from intentional destruction -- marble statues are inherently fragile (the qualities which makes marble easy to carve makes it easy to break). For instance, were statues damaged in earthquakes or shipping and then simply disposed of?
When we see faces that have been chipped away with bodies that have been allowed to let stand it's clear we're seeing something intentional -- but it's difficult to date except by careful attention to archaeological context.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:27 AM
August 3, 2005
Don't Trust Museum Labels
Prof. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revoltuion trusts a label at the National Museum of Archeology in Lima. He shows a photograph of a jug made in the shape of a Llama and a man and thinks that the man is riding the llama for transportation purposes. The label assured him "Llama usado como transporte." I think the label is wrong.
disclaimer: I am a specialist in Europe around the year 800, not pre-Columbian art. However, I know some specialists in pre-Columbian art and even once edited a masters thesis on a Peruvian weaving pattern showing jaguars where I learned some of the iconographical tricks for the woven versions of bodies. What's more, I know a lot about the awkward miscues caused by the assumption that naturalistic rendering is equivalent to Realism (with all the horrid assumptions with which that word has been burdened since 1850).
The photograph isn't quite complete - click and see - Prof. Tabarrok seems to have clipped the llama head out of the right side. The naked man is riding on the llama's back with his feet at the neck and his head over the tail. The modelling is lovely and rather convincing (other than the man's stocky neck, perhaps, which both works well in clay and echos the llama neck).
What's going on here, though, isn't "transportation" or accomodation to the llama's rather feeble frame. What we see here is a shaman and his animal spirit. Needless to say there's nothing I can find by googling that isn't by a contemporary practitioner of "shamanism" (which may be marginally more authentic than modern self-styled druids, given that there actually are shamans to go talk to in the 21st century, but these links all look shaky). Still, what we see in lots of Central and South American art shows us the transformative process between human and animal. Lots of the gold objects in the shape of animals were, we think, worn by shamans who intended to become those animals. This little jug might well have been used in the necessary ritual.
O.K. I'm making this up, but it's exactly why you take me and people like me with you to museums -- we know more than those horrid little labels. And unless Lauren Bacall is doing the audioguide, you'd be better off listening to me.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:24 PM
June 21, 2005
Try Doing THAT with film
Yesterday I shot 152 pictures before noon, came home for lunch, and sorted and labelled them all into folders. The Nikon D70 is a great camera!! Of course the hardest thing I ever do is try to get decent photos of stained glass (the exposure is not easy - either you overexpose to go for the architectural surround or you underexpose to go for the glass and lose the architecture), but luckily I have the chapel and 3 churches withing walking distance worth practicing on -- and I've already got permission from St. Stephen's RC and Trinity Episcopal but I need to call the Methodists.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 AM
June 15, 2005
And what I've been doing this week
And this is what I got to play with this week. The prices are dropping some, and there's still a rebate, so it FELT like a deal! This is where I eventually ordered it -- some individual might as well make a little money off the purchase, and goodness knows there's nowhere to buy locally.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:01 PM
June 10, 2005
Hogwarts, but with singing (and without the Reformation)
"I'd compare the Escolania with Hogwarts in 'Harry Potter,' " said Xavier Palá, a 14-year-old who is graduating. "There they teach you to make magic with wands, and here they teach us how to make magic with music."That's from an article about an 800 year old choir school (currently a boy choir, soon to be co-ed) in Catalonia, the Escolania of Montserrat, the Benedictine abbey that houses the Virign of Montserrat*, one of the great black virgins of Romanesque Europe.
*GREAT website of the Abbey, but tiny pictures. Sorry.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM
May 31, 2005
Kodak - End of the World for some
My world has already started to assimilate the idea that there will be no more Ektachrome, but the Super-8 world is protesting. The New York Times story is interesting. Passages like this may explain why Kodak is no longer the largest employer in Rochester:
"I just showed one of my films at a small gallery out in Williamsburg," said Stephanie Gray, a 33-year-old filmmaker from Queens. "It was actually the backroom of someone's apartment." Ms. Gray, who bought her Super 8 camera for $25 at a flea market, said the medium lends itself to a poetic, personal kind of filmmaking that cannot be achieved with digital filmmaking.Art's all well and good, but it doesn't keep folks employed in Upstate New York. In fact, art doesn't even make for a profit at the processing plants. An era has passed and people who debut their films in back rooms in apartments are not enough to keep a legacy product in distribution. All the art history departments of America weren't enough to save Ektachrome, and we feel much the same way about its color qualities as you'll read about Kodachrome Super-8.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:10 AM
May 29, 2005
Pollacks and Authenticity
It's not only old art that's difficult to attribute and not only Rembrandt has flocks of copiers -- read this article about Jackson Pollack paintings. Are they real? Experts disagree (for all kinds of reasons). Is it important? Well, if 32 real Pollacks hit the market it would be very interesting.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:43 AM
May 26, 2005
Beautiful Old Things? Hush! I'm Bidding on Toast in the Shape of the Virgin Mary on eBay!!
Fascinating speculation on the future of the antiques market and marketing at Cronaca. With all the money sloshing around in "collecting" you'd think antique dealers would be riding high -- but read and see.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:17 AM
May 23, 2005
The Most Horrific Living Painter
There's an interesting summary of all the anecdotes about Lucian Freud available from the Times. If you find "life of the artist" as tedious as I do (I teach art without names, as Heinrich Wolfflin used to dream of it), here's the most important sentence: He has remarked of his sitters: "I'm interested in them as animals."
Still, if you think there's something to the idea that painting is all about the application of pigment in medium to canvas and you prefer a recognizeable referent in the painting, Freud's your man. He's a genius. Go look.
Me, I don't much like biography; I prefer fiction. Patrick White's Vivisector.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM
May 18, 2005
File Under: Great Works of Art I've Never Seen
File Under: Great Works of Art I Teach But Have Never Seen -- the 20 year wait is over! The Westminster Retable is on display after restoration -- click for images. It's up at the National Gallery in London, but sometime later this year will be moved back to Westminster Abbey (which is one of the worst "church visiting" events of my recent experience, by the way -- paid admission, nasty vergers, and one-way only flow with no backtracking allowed).
The article (from the Telegraph) has some nice images -- it's well worth clicking. The first image on the story (before you click for details) shows a lovely full-length St. Peter (note the key) in a swaying pose typical of high Gothic figures, whether painted or sculpted. When you click to see the whole altarpiece you also get to see a detail of the globe in Christ's hand. You'll also see why British iconoclasm is so heartbreaking because you'll see how little of the originl painted surface we have left. If you're interested in the visible remains of Catholicism in Protestant England (for instance, how this object survived, even mutilated, when so little else did) you ought to read Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars : Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. I'd love to lead a tour of England sometime in which we did nothing but this material!
I found the story via my friend at mirabilis.ca.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:55 AM
May 12, 2005
BIG Art News - "Kindred Spirits" Goes to Bentonville? Oh, my!
Alice L. Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress and one of the richest people in the world, bought an Asher B. Durand painting yesterday from the New York Public Library for what is said to be more than $35 million. She plans to exhibit it in a museum being built by her family's foundation that is scheduled to open in May 2009 in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951.That's from the New York Times. Click and see - if you recognize much American art at all you'll recognize the painting. The New York Public Library tried to keep the painting in town, but Miss Walton outbid them. This is going to be an interesting museum -- a Safdie building and all that money to fill it with American art. If you read the description of the building you'll see why Miss Walton had to have "Kindred Spirits."
By the way, this is the second story I've blogged this month of New York institutions selling art to plow the money back into core enterprises -- here's the Diocese of Brooklyn selling a Murillo story.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:10 PM
May 4, 2005
Tonight's Post-supper Playlist
Thanks to the Airport Express my laptop is playing this through the living room speakers:
...Gladys Night and the Pips -- "Midnight Train to Georgia"
...Chaka Khan -- "Ain't Nobody"
...Aretha Franklin & Luther Vandross -- "Doctor's Orders"
...Anita Baker - "Caught up in the Rapture"
...El DeBarge -- "Sexual Healing" (off the "Marvin is 60" album - really not bad!)
...Shuggie Otis -- "Inspiration Information"
...The Gap Band -- "Burn Rubber on Me" (complete with motorcycle noises!)
...Patti LaBelle -- "If Only You Knew"
...Macy Gray -- "Still"
...Al Green -- "Take me to the River"
...Al Green -- "Let's Get Married"
...Tina Turner -- "Nutbush City Limits" (the 90s version, sans Ike)
...Parliament -- "Flashlight" (one of the greatest songs of all time)
...Erykah Badu -- "Boogie Nights/All Night" (the shuffle generated "Tyrone", but I listened to that twice last week)
...Macy Gray (with Erykah Badu) -- "Sweet Sweet Baby"
an R&B evening in Upstate New York . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:02 PM
May 3, 2005
Diocese of Brooklyn Unloads a Murillo "St. Augustine"
Well, "unload" isn't the right word when Christie's low estimate is $1,500,000. The only thing the story doesn't tell me is where these paintings are currently hanging. The collection was built up by a brainy bishop in the 30s and 40s (a great time to be buying baroque religious art, by the way -- see the Ringling Museum and Bob Jones University's collection) who preferred to build another high school than a new cathedral, at one point.
I think it's entirely appropriate for a diocese to have a museum about itself, or a museum of sacred art (though no one will ever go there! I can't tell you the number of otherwise informed people who miss the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus because it's in the fee-charging sacristy museum at St. Peter's). It is entirely appropriate to have old masters hanging over altars (so long as no one suspects that's what they are). However, a tiny collection of expensive religious art held in the chancery (and I don't know that's where it's been, since the article doesn't tell me) is better sold off and used to kick start an endowment.
via Amy Welborn.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM
April 29, 2005
Parisians Nothing - I, myself, had no idea Lévi-Strauss is still alive.
There's a big show up in Paris of Brazilian Indian material (part of France's Year of Brazil). It sounds like an interesting show, but this caught my eye. "The final room in this show is a homage to Mr. Lévi-Strauss and serves to remind many French who long ago read his 1955 classic, "Tristes Tropiques," that, at 97, he is still alive and kicking." The French, nothing - I had no idea.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:25 PM
And quite a nice student show it was, too . . . .
One of the neat things about being on leave is that I haven't been around the Art Department 6 days a week; that means I haven't already seen most of the student work -- I saw almost everything fresh!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 PM
Museum Bizarro-World - National Gallery Suspends School Tours
I really don't get this. The National Gallery is going to suspend school tours while they re-evaluate their education programs. So, for 18 months they're going to study the problem. They're telling us that running the 100-odd volunteer docents takes up so much of their time that they have to shut it down in order to think about something new (best practices are involved, so we know things will get better).
Update: National Gallery gets a grip.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM
April 27, 2005
Outsider Authenticity
Here's a good review of a serious book on Outsider Art -- what makes it work? The reviewer thinks the book does a good job of treding the line between the aesthetic and the biographical - the hunt for authenticity:
Then there is the intriguing case of "Clyde Angel," who had the correct pedigree for an Outsider Artist -- a backwoods recluse who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia. His work is delivered to a Chicago gallery by his "authorized agent." The trouble is, nobody's ever met Clyde Angel, and efforts by an enterprising journalist to track him down failed. There's speculation, says Mr. Fine, that Clyde Angel may not exist, that his "Outsider" work is really being produced by a trained artist in hiding. If that ever turned out to be true, a lucrative market would collapse overnight.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:25 AM
April 26, 2005
Oh, my - tales of storage room finds!
Here's a story about a painting at the Cathedral in Seattle. So, 50 years ago someone found a painting packed away in a storage room in the Cathedral and set it up in a chapel. It's not clear from the article they knew exactly what it was until they sent it for conservation and learned that it's a 15th century Italian painting by Neri di Bicci. So after conservation it was paraded through the streets of Seattle from the Museum to the Cathedral.
Here's a Flickr stream of the actual reinstallation process, procession and all! The giant puppet is St. James, my patron saint and the patron of the cathedral, wearing his cockleshell. You can watch it as a slideshow! Coolness!
But since I have no idea how long this Flickr stream will stay up and since there's no picture with the story, here's a link to another work by Neri de Bicci. I don't understand why so few stories on webversions of newspapers aren't illustrated!
Lessons: Never throw away old art in churches without consulting experts. Sometimes that ugly, dark painting on the stairwell is a Caravaggio. More often it's not, but it never hurts to ask.
from my friend at Mirabilis.ca
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:00 AM
April 25, 2005
Father, Son, and Holy Toast
Go here before it goes away -- the BBC Gallery of Ecumenical "Visionary" Objects
via Miss Shaidle
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM
April 24, 2005
Walk Downstairs, Fella!
Ah, the high-mindedness of criticizing museums for their lack of humor. Not that I don't agree, but the last show in the East wing of the National Gallery that I blogged about was funny - the Ed Ruscha drawings show. Indeed, if you want anything other than seriousness in major museums you might better stick to the works on paper -- the basement of the National Gallery, for instance.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:37 PM
April 23, 2005
Catlin's Indian Paintings and Nosiness
The New York Times is sensitive to George Catlin's insensitivity.
"A native person is challenged, I think, not to feel on some level a profound resentment toward Catlin; his obsession with depicting Indians has an extremely invasive undertone to it," Mr. West says.
Read some novelists about the process of making fiction out of family relationships. Read some photographers about pushing their lens into peoples' faces. These are not new phenomena -- the people who do this sort of think are appalling specimens of humanity, at least in this aspect of their lives. My favorite novel that combines the horror that is the mind of the novelist with the horror that is the painter is a Patrick White novel called The Vivisector. Useful.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:16 AM
April 13, 2005
It's all a matter of opinion -- and I am of Natalie Zemon Davis's
That previous post is a cri de coeur -- I'm buffeted by the theories of what goes on when people are having fun. There's nothing harder to deal with than theories of "funny" -- believe me on that one or I'll make you start with the reading list for my graduate seminar on the Comedic (not comedy, please!). I learned piles and piles from Prof. Bracht Branham, under whose direction I first cracked Bakhtin* (and Freud on Wit -- a little book that proves in one quick read that jokes don't translate well).
So here I am today stuck with trying to decide how in the 5 minutes remaining in my 20 minute talk I use the people who think that Carnival is revolutionary and the people who think that Carnival is (like Pilgrimage and) restorative and the cynics who think that its a combination of the two in which the wicked, wicked powers above use Carnival as a safety valve. Luckily there are voices of moderation -- Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us that Misrule can do all of 'em -- sometimes real change breaks out. Sometimes Misrule represents the reassertion of order (carried out by an age-group often associated with disorder, the adolescents**). Sometimes a parade may even be just a parade.
The problem is that one wishes to inform, to amaze, AND to show that one has done all this reading. The last consideration is why academic presentation in speech and writing is so often dull.
*Sadly, "Bakhtin" seems to be more recognizable to audiences, even medievalist audiences, than "Gurevich." Aron Gurevich has the double advantage of moderating Bakhtin's belief in the efficacy of the Carnivalesque to drive social change AND being an actual medievalist. Bakhtin has the lamentable habit of waving his hand at much of what came before Rabelais and saying "medieval" and "popular" without a whole lot of nuance. Gurevich is nuanced.**Yes, dear reader, there was such a thing as childhood and adolescence before the 18th century. Philippe Aries was wrong.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM
March 29, 2005
Authenticity
Here's a very nice article on detecting fakes in collections of pre-Columbian art -- thinking about tooling, close comparison with authetic objects (with perfect provenance), and (of course) photographs. Didn't Bernard Berenson say "the one with the largest collection of photographs wins" or some such?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:57 AM
March 5, 2005
A Motto to live by
I don't like music I only like, I only like music I love . . . .
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:15 PM
February 26, 2005
Ruscha at the National Gallery
Run, quick, click - I don't know how long the photo gallery hosted by the Washington Post will last (the article's not bad, either, but be sure to view the photo gallery). There's a big Ed Ruscha show at the National Gallery in Washington through May 30th.
Like most overly big shows by a single artist you'll see too much of him and get bored or annoyed (annoyed is likely with Ruscha, who can be very arch), but he's worth coming back to when you calm down. I bet that you saw the book Guacamole Airlines on the remainder tables of big book stores all through the 80s - it used to be everywhere. Sadly, there's no cover art at Amazon. Here're some pictures from the Getty, but not the best examples. Here's a nice one from the University of Kentucky collection -- think of the sky instead filled with cherubs and ribbons framing a Virgin Immaculate and you'll see some what he's getting at. OH, my. If you're getting interested, this is what you want, your tax dollars at work. It's too much, but in a splendid way, and with great comparisons.
Why am I so enthusiastic? Two reasons, really.
First and most personally, Ruscha showed me that serious art could be funny. When I was 17 I was walking through a major museum and saw "Babycakes, Suspended" (there's an example of the Babycakes series in the Post slide show!). I had never laughed in a museum before (this was 1979, you realize - art WAS more solemn, then). The work (perhaps a silkscreen?) showed a little packet of blue squares tied up in a pink ribbon, the top blue square labelled "Babycake". The packet cast a shadow. The title, "Babycakes, suspended." You probably had to be there, and had to have had a whole summer walking through great museums with a capital G and M. So, now I'm an art historian; though I take art deadly seriously, I'm seldom solemn about it.
Second, and more professionally, Ruscha appeals to my own research interests - I work on the fragile membrane between art and explanation, especially on art objects that are accompanied by a written explanation - an inscription. I stress an explanation because the fun part is working out the extent to whcih the inscription is true or false, helpful or obfuscatory, contemporary or added by a later and ill-informed hand. Many of Ruscha's two-dimensional works play with this. He can paint a shadow that would shut up a philistine (you know, the "my 6 year old could do that" type) or he can paint a shadow that a 6 year old could do -- it depends on what he's aiming at.
Maybe I need to consider a trip to Washington before June. I saw the Modigliani show at the Philips when it was at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, which cuts into my attempt to justify a trip. If you haven't seen it and don't mind a big dose of depression it's worthwhile, too.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:31 PM
February 10, 2005
City Museum of Washington Begs for Bucks
All hat, no cattle - what about all building, no exhibits? Wasn't that more or less the complaint about the City of Washington museum when it closed last fall, that they had splendidly restored (yet another damn*) Carnegie Library but had nothing much on display? Well, they're trying again. They only want a million dollar a year subsidy. And they intend to rent out most of their building. Yes. Most. "He said the museum would occupy part of the reopened building, most of which would be geared to tourists and convention-goers."
I think this is an exemplary case of historical preservation over sense. They had no collection, they had no exhibition plan, they only had big money for restoration. They restored it and no one came. "Although initial attendance projections ranged from 100,000 to 450,000 a year, the museum, which opened in May 2003, drew only 36,536 paying visitors in its first 15 months."
*Historical preservation absolutists will disagree, but there are too many Beaux Arts buildings in Washington as it is (and too many flailing reuses for Carnegie Libraries elsewhere, come to that - reading rooms actually don't make great restaurants. They were designed for shushing librarians, after all -- the marble makes them far too noisy.).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM
January 26, 2005
Embarassment of Riches, or "Damn! Another Statue! Hide it!"
Europe is different. We have heavy rains, houses get washed away. Sometimes a dinosaur bone shows up in the stream bank. They have heavy rains, and this kind of thing happens:
Last week’s heavy rainfall in Athens has led to the discovery of a Roman marble statue which had been apparently dumped in a streambed in the southern suburbs, an archaeologist said yesterday.A colleague of mine, born and raised in France and educated in Spain, tries to explain it to our students this way -- in America we have extent of space; you can go in any direction and America keeps going. In Europe we have extent of time; everywhere you look there's something 2,000 years old peeking out from under a rock. It's not a bad formulation.
The 1.8-meter tall marble torso of a young man was spotted on Thursday night in the Pikrodafni streambed, in Palaio Faliron — near the intersection of Dimocratias and Pikrodafnis Streets — by a passer-by who alerted authorities, said Yiorgos Steinhauer, head of the Culture Ministry’s local antiquities department.
The first-century-AD work is a Roman copy of a fourth-century-BC classical original and possibly represents Apollo Lykeios. Steinhauer said the statue could have been recently discovered by builders during construction work, and dumped in the streambed for fear archaeologists might stop the works if alerted to the find.
via Cronaca, source of fine email updates for art history classes.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:08 AM