Cities of 2019

I'm a bit late to recording the places that AA & I visited, for work or vacation, in 2019. We have some more travel coming up, so it made me realize I had yet to take stock and express how fortunate we are to be able to travel and take in these new experiences (e.g. here is the 2018 list). I've always said that the more you travel, the smaller the world becomes, in ways that are rather humbling. We as a people have a tendency by our nature to see ourselves myopically as being at the "center" of our world, and when you see how many other people out there are existing simultaneously and contiguously, many of whom coincidentally also see themselves in their own "center-world," you realize how short-sighted such a view can be. For some people travel is disheartening or uncomfortable, as you're forced out of a comfort zone, but once you learn to embrace that sense of new-ness, exploring and embracing new cultures and seeing the wonders of new places out there, it's that experience that becomes the most comfortable.

This past year we made a return visit to Iceland because we loved it so much the first time. We saw so many beautiful natural wonders along the southern coast (picture at right of me with a glacier in the distance), but we still never saw the Northern Lights, so at least one more winter visit is in order! Having an opportunity to visit Vienna in November also was very nice (picture above of us on the grounds of the Schoenbrunn Palace). Vienna is a sophisticated city with some great museums and the coffee house culture is more relaxing than I anticipated. It was a long-awaited opportunity for me to see 4 major works of art I had waited a long time to see: Pieter Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow; Benvenuto Cellini's salt cellar; Antonio Canova's monument to the Archduchess Maria Christina; and Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. None of them disappointed.

Within the USA, I was able to get to know Chicago a lot better after we made two visits there together, and I made first-time work-related trips to Minneapolis and Santa Fe. The first city surprised me for its lush greenery (it was June and they had had substantial rain beforehand), and the second surprised me for its dry-desert serenity. I have to confess I'm more of an ocean person than a mountain/desert person, so returning to Ogunquit again gave us a few days of R&R without worrying about site-seeing.

Here's the list of cities I visited in 2019, and ever onward for those of 2020...

Chicago, Illinois (2 visits)
Leeds, England
London, England (2 visits)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
New Haven, Connecticut
New Orleans, Louisiana
Northamptonshire, England
Ogunquit, Maine
Paris, France
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Reykjavik/Hella, Iceland
Santa Fe, New Mexico
St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor/Tarpon Springs, Florida (2 visits)
Vienna, Austria

Projects of 2019

Here's my annual list of professional "projects" that I was involved in and overseeing during 2019. (You can read previous lists here and here.) As I've mentioned in the past, it's good to take stock of these accomplishments because it helps remind me how busy things have been, particularly as I have a tendency to always move on to the next project and forget what I've already done. The photo you see here is of me giving the introductory remarks at an event I coordinated in April, an "Evening at Avery: British Portraiture", to coincide with the exhibition I co-curated (more on that below; no idea whose head that is in the photo!). The event had a surprisingly good turn-out, and our two speakers were Mateusz Mayer, PhD student in art history, who co-curated the exhibition with me, and Dr. Meredith Gamer, assistant professor of art history at Columbia who gave a riveting talk about alternative concepts of 18th-century British portraiture for those who are often forgotten by history and society.

Here is the 2019 list...

• I published two book reviews, which I mentioned about in my Books of 2019 post as well. The first was a short review on Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture, about which I posted even more. The second was a review essay in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide on Anthea Callen's new book Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body.
• I curated at work a summer exhibition entitled Animalia: The Essence of Animals in Art, with artwork from the permanent collection dating from 3rd-century Mexican dog sculptures to contemporary Inuit sculptures. During the winter/spring, I co-curated the exhibition Hoppner, Beechey, Fisher, Lavery: Researching Columbia's Portraits with M. Mayer, and we published online a catalogue of the exhibition with essays by both of us, which you can download and read here. My staff and colleagues at work deserve lots of credit for all their help in making these exhibitions possible.
• I acted as curatorial project manager with Dr. Frederique Baumgartner on the "MA in Art History Presents" exhibition at Columbia entitled Clodion (1738-1814) and "Clodion Mania" in Nineteenth-Century France, which has a fantastic online exhibition component you can see here.
• Tomas Macsotay and I co-chaired a panel session entitled "Transnationalism and Sculpture in the Long Nineteenth Century (ca. 1785-1915)" at the annual conference of the College Art Association in February in NYC.
• I served on the selection committee & jury for the 16th annual graduate student symposium co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum of Art in March in NYC.
• I was the guest speaker at a Columbia Alumni Association of New Mexico event, where I spoke about the collections and our educational programs to alumni. This took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico in September.
• Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology had received a small grant to coordinate an international project called Parallel Heritages, with some of their students and students at The Sorbonne, Univ. Paris I, for an international research project on archaeological objects in both collections. I gave presentations at both components, in NYC in March, and in Paris at The Sorbonne in November.
• I also gave a paper entitled "British Portraits at Columbia University: Opportunities for Object-Centered Learning" at the annual Understanding British Portraits seminar, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in November.
• I participated in the annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries in June in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• Totally not work-related, but worth documenting... in February AA & I took a fantastic wine-tasting class that was incredibly informative (we are doing a repeat, focused version on Italian wines later this month), as well as a fun cocktail making class in December. We also went to go see the opera The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera and Moulin Rouge on Broadway.

All in all, another incredibly productive and fulfilling year!

Books of 2019

This morning, AA said to me by text, "Aren't you going to blog about your Books of 2019?" And so here I am doing it, while he's on an airplane heading back home so we can celebrate New Year's Eve just in time with a glass of prosecco. Normally I write this post soon after the annual 100 Notable Books from The New York Times comes out, but we were away at that time and . . . well, that thing called daily life just kept delaying things. Over the last few years, though, I've discovered that not all of the books on the list are among my favorites once I actually read them. Case in point: last year, Tana French's The Witch Elm and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry were on their list, and I was eager to read them, but to be frank I didn't find either book to be "best" reads. In my opinion, French's book was too dense with excessive details for that type of book (mystery/thriller), so by the time you started getting into the actual mystery, the suspense wasn't there for me. Halliday's book, in turn, was creative as a writing experiment (two novellas that seem to have nothing to do with one another, then somehow become linked in a coda-story), so it wasn't as if I didn't like the book, but it just wasn't what I would consider to be a favorite. All that said, I had commented last year about looking forward to reading Michelle Obama's autobiography, and that was great--inspiring even! I guess I'm biased, but what made it such an enjoyable read was that it felt like she was talking to you the entire time, telling you not just about her life but the lessons she learned from her experiences.

The image you see above is undoubtedly my favorite novel that I read this year. Colson Whitehead's new book was published in 2019 and I bought and read it immediately. I loved The Underground Railroad, as painful as that book was to read, so while The Nickel Boys wasn't "magically realistic" as components of his previous book was, the pain and anguish, and the lessons we have to learn still about America's history of racism and abuse of power, were remarkably strong with completely different types of stories. Whitehead has this uncanny ability in these two books to create a narrative voice that allows you to feel the pain of his characters, but still keep yourself at a distance so you can process it objectively. I see him as an heir to Toni Morrison in some ways. I have no doubt that these two books will be models of a new American literature for generations to come, much the same way Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has been. That was a book I also finally read earlier this year for the first time. I discovered the Icelandic author Sjón this year with his fairy-tale-with-a-twist The Blue Fox, and I thoroughly enjoyed, both as a mystery and a meta-novel, Anthony Horowitz's clever The Word Is Murder. I should add that a year ago when I did my last books post, I was worried that Persuasion wasn't going to end well, but I'm pleased to say that it was in fact probably my favorite Jane Austen novel of them all. I read somewhere that if you loved Pride and Prejudice as a young person, Persuasion is the book you read as a mature adult to find satisfaction in her writing. It is so true.

In the world of non-fiction, I enjoyed and learned a lot from Richard Holmes's group biography The Age of Wonder, on the history of science and Romanticism around the years 1800. I read the collection of essays Beyond the Face, providing new interpretations on portraiture in the history of art of the United States and beyond, and published a book review of it which you can read here as well as my blog post here where I add more about the artist Carrie Mae Weems. I also read Anthea Callen's new art history/anatomy book Looking at Men, and published an extended book review essay in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which you can read here. Right now, my bedtime read is Robert K. Massie's biography of Catherine the Great, and my subway reading is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I read back in college (almost 30 years ago!), but decided to revisit all these years later.

It seemed like a good idea to actually share the full list of the 30 books I've read this year. This is the order in which I finished them, and I've included the publication year in brackets, and my star rankings (5-stars is highest!) to help anyone along if they decide they want to read these. Here's to 2020 and more books to read!

• Persuasion by Jane Austen [1818] (*****)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [1960] (*****)
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes [2008] (*****)
• Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture by Wendy Wick Reaves, ed. [2018] (****)
• Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason, trans. B. Scudder & V. Cribb [2005] (****)
• The Blue Fox by Sjón, trans. V. Cribb [2004] (*****)
• Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art by Philip Hook [2017] (***)
• The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel [2014] (***)
• The Body in Three Dimensions by Tom Flynn [1998] (***)
• Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein [1999] (****)
• Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body [2018] (***)
• Becoming by Michelle Obama [2018] (*****)
• The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware [2018] (***)
• The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity by Linda Nochlin [1994] (****)
• Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes by Martin Edwards, ed. [2016] (****)
• Model and Supermodel: The Artist's Model in British Art and Culture by J. Desmarais, M. Postle & W. Vaughan, eds. [2006] (****)
• Bloomsbury at Home by Pamela Todd [1999] (****)
• Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday [2018] (****)
• Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh [1987] (***)
• The Child’s Child by Barbara Vine [2012] (***)
• The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead [2019] (*****)
• The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst [2017] (****)
• Harm Done by Ruth Rendell [1999] (****)
• Bacchante and Infant Faun: Tradition, Controversy, and Legacy by Thayer Tolles [2019] (****)
• 30 Favorites Celebrating 30 Years by Stacia Lewandowski & Zaplin Lampert Gallery [2017] (***)
• The Stonewall Reader by Jason Baumann, ed. [2019] (***)
• Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rika Burnham & Elliott Kai-Kee [2011] (****)
• Losing Helen: An Essay by Carol Becker [2016] (*****)
• The Witch Elm by Tana French [2018] (***)
• The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz [2018] (*****) 

First Snowfall & Snowstorm: 2019-2020 Fall/Winter

Has it really been almost nine months since I last blogged? One would like to imagine that this period of gestation might have led to the birth of something magnificent and wonderful that I could announce here.

Alas, no. It's just snow.

Perhaps it was the annual recurrence of this phenomenon of nature in the Northeast (i.e. here and here) that has drawn me back to the blog. Perhaps it is the anticipation and expectation of the cold season that has inspired me to return, huddled in front of my laptop, listening to the loud rush of gusty air from the heating unit not too far away. I don't want to make any claims or set hopes high: let's take all this one day at a time...

Today was our first snowfall and, I think it's safe to say, our first snowstorm, here in the NYC area, as we received a few inches for sure. I took the picture you see here at 3:03 PM on the campus of Columbia University. I was on a coffee break, and I was surprised to see that the snow was sticking. The campus plows had already come through at least once.

Technically, though, I imagine I should claim the first snowfall for AA and me actually was last Thursday--yes, on Thanksgiving!--not here in the NYC area but in Chicago. We were getting ready to head out to our "Friendsgiving" dinner when AA noticed snow flurries out our window on the 28th floor. By the time we went downstairs, however, the snow flurries had already dissipated into dewy drops, making me realize that what we saw above never actually made it to the ground. Indeed, on the ground, no one even knew that it had been snowing. It was an interesting existential moment: the realization that two different people in the same location (albeit, at different vertical planes) could experience nature in two very different ways...

Have you missed this?  More anon from bklynbiblio...I hope...

British Portraits at Columbia Catalogue

Just over a month ago, I blogged about the new exhibition about four British portraits that we have on view at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. The paintings are from Columbia's permanent collection. I'm pleased to share the news that the pamphlet-type catalogue we've published is now available for free to download from Columbia's Academic Commons network (click here). I'm incredibly pleased with this came out, which is a testament to the incredible design skills of Katherine Prater, one of my co-workers. The essays are extended versions of the didactic panels Mateusz and I wrote.

Ten days ago, on April 4th, we hosted an invitation-only Evening at Avery to celebrate the exhibition and bring more paintings out to show. Dr. Meredith Gamer was our keynote speaker, and my co-curator MM and I also gave brief talks that were well-received. My thanks to Paul Jeromack for sending me pictures he took from the evening, which I am posting here.

The Social Media Phenomenon (aka Naked Men)

24 hours ago, I was in Chelsea to see two exhibitions: Jeff Miller's show "Through the Looking-Glass: Alter Egos & Others" at the Atlantic Gallery; and "The Young and Evil" curated by Jarrett Earnest at David Zwirner. Soon afterward, I posted on my Instagram account pictures showing installation views and object shots from both shows. Whenever I post on Instagram, the norm for me is about 50-60 likes. Occasionally, it goes up to the 80+, and I've had about 4 posts that were liked by over 100 people. Let's face it: despite some personal "fans" (you are reading this right now!), I'm not a social media phenomenon, nor have I ever aspired to be. So you can probably imagine my complete shock and surprise how--only 24 hours later--I now have over 1,300 likes on my Instagram post about the exhibition at David Zwirner. I am literally stunned by this and--dare I say--even a little disturbed by it. I said to AA at least twice today "post a picture of a painting of a naked man..." Clearly that has something to do with it. But there has to be something else going on. I wonder if it is some sort of algorithm, pushing the image higher in the search for people or coming up randomly on people's Instagram posts because friends-of-friends-of-friends are liking it, and it's growing exponentially as a result. I don't think my hashtags (e.g. #queerart #stonewall50 etc.) are that special, but maybe I'm wrong. It has occurred to me that perhaps the gallery is somehow actively pushing the feed, but I don't see how they could do that. In any case, it's all completely bizarre how over 1,300 people I have never met, who live everywhere in the world, are liking these pictures. A few have commented and asked questions, so I've helped identify the works and responded to them. Some have started following me now, which is how this is supposed to work I imagine, and I in turn have chosen to follow a few back.

What is fantastic about the exhibition (which has now closed--yesterday was the last day) is that it presents a number of pictures never published before and rarely, if ever, seen by the public, all depicting works of art by a group of gay male artists (and women close to them) who were all active in the 1930s and 1940s in New York City.  The artists on view include Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, and so on. The style of art is largely figurative, somewhat surrealist, frequently provocative (and unapologetically so), and using older painting techniques out of favor at the time (e.g. tempera paint). Ultimately, it presents an alternative canon of American art, and it challenges the modernist tendencies that lean towards abstraction and social realism--art movements almost completely dominated by heterosexual men, culminating in the mid-century, uber-macho-modernity of Abstract Expressionism (i.e. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc.). One of the artists who has been underappreciated and clearly comes to the foreground in the show is the Russian-born artist Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957). The image you see above is by him: The Lion Boy, 1936-37, gouache on paper mounted onto canvas. The stark hyperrealism of the muscular, blonde youth whose mane-like hair bursts from his body even more strongly than that from his head is without a doubt incredibly startling to see. The fact that it is uncomfortable for some to even see it now, or the fact that so many others are enamored of it because of its eroticism, reinforces how unusual such images are in our society. Would anyone have reacted the same way if it was a painting of a nude woman with blonde hair? I doubt it. Even if it were a spectacular painting, I can't imagine that it would have generated over 1,300 likes just 24 hours after I had posted the picture.

Going back to Jeff Miller's show, if you're in the NYC area, you should go see his show too before it closes next week. Like the other exhibition profiling gay male artists, Miller exhibits his own interpretation of the idealized male body. His drawings have a fascinating energy to them, and his hyperrealistic sculptures play with ideas of ego and superego in their doubling effect. So far, though, the post of his pictures on Instagram has only generated about 40 likes in 24 hours. The thing is, that is actually a great number! But when compared to the other post, it just demonstrates that there is something more going on that has to explain how the other post has literally shot through the social media roof.

Review: Beyond the Face (and Carrie Mae Weems)

Earlier this month, ARLIS/NA Reviews published my short review on the new book Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture, which was published in 2018 by the Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. Edited by curator emerita Wendy Wick Reaves, the book includes her introduction and sixteen essays by junior and established scholars on aspects of American portraiture. You can read my review here. The book truly does offer new insights into thinking about American portraiture, historical and modern/contemporary, with a particular emphasis on non-white artists and representations thereof. The essays on photography were among the most interesting, and I mentioned in the review that one scholar's take on a photograph by Carrie Mae Weems was brilliant. I thought I would engage with that a little more here.

Nikki A. Greene's essay, "Habla LAMADRE: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carrie Mae Weems, and Black Feminist Performance," focused on these two women artists, but more importantly engaged with the way that women of color have been excluded historically as makers of art from the great museum collections and exhibition programs. Weems's 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was unprecedented, as she was the first African-American woman to have a show there. I remember the exhibition well; it was incredibly moving and powerful. Weems's photographs from her Museums series position the artist as a Ruckenfigur, displaying her body shrouded in black to the viewer as she stands outside the great cultural institutions and museums worldwide as an outsider. In her essay, Greene writes of the image you see here, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2006, as follows:

Weems journeyed to northern Spain ... to encounter the seduction of the sweeping, undulating, titanium walls of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997. In the photograph Guggenheim Bilbao, Weems stands as a dark silhouette in her black, long-sleeved dress with her back to the viewer .... Weems stretches her arms outward to rest her hands on a white railing that heightens the chasm between her and the museum as water gently ripples below her. The framing of this photograph plays on the building's ship-like forms, with stern-like triangular peaks making Weems appear as if she is viewing the museum across a body of water from her own ship. Weems's serenity in the face of the immensity of the museum's presence grounds the viewer, encouraging a pause as the two ships purportedly confront each other. This moment of recognition of each other's position in space acknowledges their unreachability. (pp. 294-95)

What Greene also intimates with this ship-like allusion is the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing legacy of slavery as a hindrance to people of color, in this instance in an art world dominated by white privilege and the 1%. Greene's reading of this image is wonderfully intuitive.

The next book I'm scheduled to review for a publication is this: Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body by Anthea Callen (2018). The book focuses on the nineteenth century. It should prove an interesting read, incorporating issues of science and medicine along with artistic practice, framed by the development of heterosexual, homosocial, and homosexual identities over the course of the century. Or so I hope!

British Portraits at Columbia Exhibition

On February 11th, we officially opened a new exhibition at work that I curated with PhD art-history student Mateusz Mayer. The show is entitled Hoppner, Beechey, Fisher, Lavery: Researching Columbia's Portraits, and is on view in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Wallach Study Center for Art & Architecture, until May 10th. It is open to the public Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm. This focused exhibition showcases four rarely-seen historical British portraits from the permanent collection, and transforms them into objects of study rather than present them as traditional museum-style masterpieces by these artists. The portraits were painted between the years 1800 and 1927, and the show highlights new discoveries that we have made about them, ranging from biography to provenance to political propaganda. As examples of British portraits, the show also seeks to query the idea of "British-ness," both in its historical context and in the age of Brexit.

One of the paintings on view is the work you see here, a portrait of King George III by Sir William Beechey and his studio. The portrait depicts the king wearing a field marshal's uniform, his bicorn hat and Star of the Order of the Garter prominent ornaments to his outfit. The painting is an artist's copy of his life-sized portrait of the king that he exhibited at the 1800 Royal Academy exhibition, now in the Royal Collection. The painting became so popular (arguably a form of political propaganda) that Beechey's studio produced numerous replicas and copies, some with various backgrounds and in half-size and portrait-bust versions. In the background of this portrait is Windsor Castle, the king's primary residence, where Beechey likely painted the original version. This painting was a gift to Columbia in 1943 by Mrs. Mary Hill Hill. Her doubled surname is not an accident: her father and husband, both of whom were railroad magnates, had the same last names, but there were no family relations between them. Although originally from Minnesota, Mrs. Hill Hill lived at the time of the donation in Tarrytown, NY, and auction catalogs after her death show that she was an avid collector of 18th-century British portraits and George III silver.

A free accompanying exhibition catalog will be made available very soon, so I'll post a link to the PDF version when it's ready.

First Snowstorm: 2019 Winter

This snow season has been a bit strange. We had an early first snowfall back in November, and while we've had a couple of light flurries since then, it's taken until during this past night and this morning for us to have what I would qualify as being some semblance of a snowstorm. This is a photo I took outside our loft window about 7:40am this morning (and, yes, it is coincidentally the same view that I posted last time!). By that time Newark Airport was reporting over 4 inches of snow. It's all supposed to stop in a little while, but then snow again tomorrow and all Sunday night, so Monday morning commuting should be a bit miserable. It's always lovely to see the snow come down and blanket everything in shimmering whiteness; the dirty snow and mucky slush is the let-down afterward. Overall, though, this has been a light snow season as compared to other years.

Projects of 2018

Here is my last "highlights" list from 2018...a little late, perhaps, but not by much... (Here is the 2017 list.) I've discovered it's beneficial for me to record these events because it helps me take stock of the activities I've been involved with and what I've accomplished. I have a tendency to forget things and move on, and reflecting on these things annually makes me realize that I am doing quite a lot professionally and that I need to stop being so self-critical about what it is that I am not doing.

The picture you see here commemorates one of the more memorable events. In early October, I joined my fellow Solomaniac friend & colleague Carolyn Conroy and numerous descendants of the Solomon/Salaman family for the rededication of the Salaman family graves and a visit to the recently rededicated grave of Simeon Solomon, all at Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London. It was a special and humbling moment to be there.

In addition to all our travels (professional and vacation), here is the 2018 list of projects...

• Published two articles on the sculptor John Gibson: the first, co-authored with M.G. Sullivan, was on Gibson's portraiture practice, and was published in Tate Papers this past June 2018; the second was on Gibson's portrait statue of the Countess Beauchamp, and was published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide in October 2018. I am very pleased with both of these and they will help advance awareness about his work to those interested in sculpture studies.
• bklynbiblio celebrated its 10th birthday!
• I curated an exhibition entitled Wisdom of the East: Buddhist Art from the J. G. Phelps Stokes Collection which was on view during the summer months at Columbia University.
• I acted as curatorial project manager with Dr. Frederique Baumgartner on two "MA in Art History Presents" exhibitions at Columbia: Art in Life: Engravings by Robert Nanteuil (c. 1623-1678) from the Frederick Paul Keppel Collection (Spring 2018) and Looking East: James Justinian Morier and Nineteenth-Century Persia (Fall 2018), supplementing the latter show with a curated installation of Iranian ceramics from the 10th-19th centuries.
• Co-chaired a panel session with Petra Chu entitled "Born-digital and Other E-journals in Art History: Crossing Boundaries among Art Historians, Editors, and Librarians" at the Art Libraries Society of North America conference in February in NYC.
• Served on the selection committee & jury for the Graduate Student Symposium co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum of Art in March in NYC.
• Co-chaired an all-day panel session with Tomas Macsotay entitled "The National in Discourses of Sculpture in the Long Modern Period (c. 1750-1950)" at the Association for Art History conference in April in London.
• Gave a 30-minute talk on Gibson's Tinted Venus at the Met Breuer in NYC in April for a curatorial study day in conjunction with the exhibition Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body.
• Attended the conference The Afterlife of Sculptures: Posthumous Casts in Scholarship, the Market, and the Law at the Dedalus Foundation in NYC in May.
• Attended the conference Multiple Modernities in American Art at Sotheby's in NYC in May.
• Co-presented a paper with Melanie Wacker entitled "From Curatorial Files to Linked Open Data: Cataloging the Art Collection at Columbia University" at the 8th International Conference of Art Libraries at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in October.
• Organized a half-day symposium entitled Global Art History and Nineteenth-Century Art at Columbia in November.
• Gave an hour-long presentation on the Columbia art collection and object-centered learning at Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut in November.
• Took a bread baking class with AA in January that was incredible fun, and took a stone carving sculpture class in September that I'm actually still doing (more on that in another blog post!).
• Not that it's professional but worth documenting...went to see the following theatrical performances: John Leguizamo's Latin History for Morons (February); Desperate Measures (June); Ballet Folklorico de Mexico (November); and La Traviata at The Met (December).

600 Posts!

When I wrote my annual New Year's post, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that was my 599th blog post. When I went back to see when #500 was, I was even more surprised to realize it had taken place on New Year's Day in 2015...AND that #400 had coincided with 2013 New Year's. It seems oddly serendipitous, then, that my 600th post is happening now, and still rather amazing that I've had this blog going for 10 years now. I've decided to leave the design of the blog as-is for now, but it's always fun to look at statistics and see how the site has been reached and what are the most popular posts.

The blog statistics show that I've now had 185,536 page views since August 2008, with visitors mostly coming from U.S. Internet addresses, followed by Russia (!), France, United Kingdom, and Germany, with Italy just barely behind Germany. Readers are mostly coming from Internet Explorer browsers still, although that has dropped down a few percents since 2015 to 36%, while Firefox (30%) and Chrome (22%) use has gone up respectively by 4% and 3% since 500 posts. Not surprisingly, Google searching accounts for about 2/3 of all the statistics in terms of being directed to specific posts. When I look at the most popular blog posts since August 2008, I have to laugh that #1 has remained the most frequently visited/read post (you wouldn't believe how much spam commentary I get on that one!). What was #4 on the 500th mark has bumped up to #2, and remarkably my #s 3, 4, and 5 are all new posts since 2015. Who knew that my Inauguration Day 2017 rant would generate such a high number of reads!? Here's the current ranking:
#1: Male Enhancement [Jul. 5, 2010; 2675 views]
#2: Post-Queer Art History [Oct. 13, 2009; 1699 views]
#3: President Tyrant [Jan. 21, 2017; 1590 views]
#4: Poem #2 [Jan. 30, 2017; 1451 views]
#5: Poem #1 [Nov. 29, 2016; 1350 views]

It is interesting that my recording of two poems, relating them to certain events at the time, come up as being so popular. I suspect it has to do with the fact that someone is searching for the actual poems or poetry by the authors (in this case respectively Emma Lazarus and Florine Stettheimer), but I appreciate their discovery here and makes me wonder if there is a renewed interest in reading poetry? Last year, I read Richard Blanco's memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey, which was so fantastic in terms of his life experience as a gay Latino in America, but also his zeal and drive for poetry and writing, and reading his poem at Pres. Obama's inauguration. Perhaps we all need more poetry in our lives...

Thank you to the readers who contact me with encouragement to continue blogging along!

Happy 2019!

Earlier today I was speaking to Uncle Eddy and I said to him, "Can you imagine it's 2019?!"--to which he replied, "NO!" The way time flies by, it won't be long before we hit 2028, the centenary of his birth! We spent a lovely Christmas and the week afterward with AA's family in Kansas City, MO. Aside from family visits, I indulged in my first-ever KC barbecue dinner (delicious, but heavy on meat), and we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National World War I Memorial and Museum over the course of the week. We flew home on Sunday, then headed into the City the next day for a New Year's Eve dinner with AR, GM, and GG. It was pouring in NYC, so everyone gathered for the Times Square ball-drop got drenched, including Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper (above), whom we watched while staying toasty warm and dry just a few blocks away watching and supporting our fellow gays on TV. (Other than watching Anderson Cooper get drunk on shots, it wasn't as eventful as we would have hoped though. Or am I being nostalgic for Dick Clark?)

Today for New Year's Day we had a quiet day at home. We ate for dinner butternut squash soup, cod with lemon and pomegranate, and steamed broccoli. Then we watched the gay-themed movie The Cakemaker (2017, image right), in which a German baker goes to Jerusalem to find the family of his recently deceased lover, with some awkward consequences. It wasn't a bad movie...the acting and directing was good, there were some existential questions about sexuality worth pondering, and there were a few important moments about Jewish/Gentile cultural differences, but it was a bit slow. I am craving black forest cake now (you have to watch to get the message).

Happy 2019!

Cities of 2018

The past few years (e.g. here and here), I've been recording a list of all the cities outside NJ/NY that either I visited for work-related purposes, or that AA and I went to for a vacation. There is little doubt that the two most remarkable places we visited in 2018 were the furthest north and the furthest south I've ever been before: Iceland and Costa Rica. Both of these trips were remarkable for being very nature-oriented. 

Reykjavik is fine city, but it was our Golden Circle tour that brought us to Thingvellir National Park, where we saw the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates crashed against one another--a humbling experience--as well as the site where their Parliament met for over 1,000 years until they built an actual building in Reykjavik in 1930. The waterfalls and geysers were spectacular as well. Iceland is like being on another planet; it's completely desolate but remarkable for its unusual geological formations and hot springs. We missed the Northern Lights and the spa experience, so another visit is in order! Save money if you're thinking about going, though, because it's not cheap!

On the complete opposite spectrum, Costa Rica's southwestern Pacific coast was unlike anything I ever experienced, with spectacular views and wildlife that made me smile non-stop. Monkeys howl in the trees around you and greet you on your patio (and, yes, try to steal your food!), and there are giant iguanas, tropical birds, and actual crabs that walk right past you too. We went zip-lining while we were there, among other adventures--something I never thought I would do (picture at right, climbing stairs to the next zip!)--and I loved it. It was an incredible outdoorsy trip with a wonderfully relaxing hotel at the top of a mountain.

We also had wonderful opportunities to visit with family, and another great adventure happened in our own backyard when, in one day with AA's family, we toured NYC by boat (Circle Line), land (walking the streets), and air--a helicopter tour (photo at the top!). The helicopter tour was exhilarating...if also admittedly a tad frightening...but that's what these adventures are all about...pushing yourself just a little further to experience all that life has to offer. We always take stock and remember how fortunate we are to be able to travel, and we are forever grateful for these experiences of the world. Here are the Cities of 2018...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Athens/Atlanta, Georgia

Fairfield, Connecticut

The Hague/Delft, The Netherlands

Kansas City, Missouri (leaving for here tonight!)

Leamington Spa, England

Liverpool, England

London, England (2 visits)

Manuel Antonio/Quepos, Costa Rica

Montreal, Canada

New Haven, Connecticut

Ogunquit, Maine

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Quebec City, Canada

Reykjavik, Iceland

St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor/Tarpon Springs, Florida (3 visits)

La Traviata at The Met

Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata, first shown in Venice in 1853, is undoubtedly one of my favorites in terms of the music and arias. There's something incredibly lyrical and moving about upbeat, vivacious celebrations like "Libiamo, ne' lieti calici," and emotionally bittersweet duets like when Violetta and Alfredo profess their love..."Croce e delizio al cor." I've seen this opera live three times in my life (yes, I've kept a record!): the New York City Opera in Clearwater at Ruth Eckerd Hall on March 23, 1996; the Florida Grand Opera in Miami on November 18, 2003; and now The Met Opera in New York on December 11, 2018. Third time was the charm for sure; the performance was wonderful.

I had gotten tickets for us as a birthday gift for AA, and what intrigued me about this version of the opera was that it was a new production staged by Michael Mayer, and it would be the premiere of The Met's new musical director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The orchestral performance was fantastic; to quote The New York Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini: "I expected his 'Traviata' to be good, but not this good." Tommasini goes on to describe soprano Diana Damrau's performance as Violetta as "extraordinary...singing with big, plush yet focused sound," and baritone Quinn Kelsey as Germont as "grave and formidable." Both of them were excellent. I was admittedly a little disappointed in tenor Juan Diego Florez as Alfredo, not because he sang poorly but because he was not strong enough, but apparently that was part of his characterization of Alfredo, to make him more shy and uncertain. I thought the new stage production by Mayer, with seasonal changes in lighting, and a neo-Baroque Second Empire interior, were lovely and appropriate. The costumes did seem to come out of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, but overall it added to the colorful, moving performance overall.

The Met's website for the production has excellent videos with scenes and arias, as well as background information on the production, all worth watching. In reading the Playbill, I was surprised to discover that La Traviata first premiered at The Met in 1883, one month after they opened, went on hiatus for nine years, and since then has been performed over 1000 times, in a number of different well-known productions. Going to The Met can be extremely expensive these days, but we were fortunate to have discounted tickets I got through Columbia. I've been to The Met a few other times before, having seen performances of Aida (2012) and Tosca (2015). But it is worth noting that my very first live opera experience, when I was about 13 years old, was at The Met. Uncle Peter and Aunt Florence had been given last-minute box seats for Rigoletto that a friend of theirs could not use, and knowing my rising interest at that time, they invited me to go, so I went with Uncle Peter. The funny thing was that Woody Allen and Mia Farrow sat in the box next to us...and left during one of the intermissions! Going to The Met at that age (on a school night!), seeing my first opera live in that setting, was one of those lifetime memories you never forget.

Morier and Persia Exhibition

It may seem strange to be blogging about an exhibition that has now closed, but it only occurred to me last night that I never wrote about the exhibition Looking East: James Justinian Morier & Nineteenth-Century Persia that we recently had on view in our display cases in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. (Chalk it up to having been too busy for months to actually write about it!) The exhibition was part of the MA in Art History Presents series, the second in a new series in which the MA students curate an exhibition utilizing art from Columbia's permanent collection, under the guidance of Dr. Frederique Baumgartner (director of the MA program, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University) and me (curator of Art Properties, Avery Library, Columbia University). You may recall that earlier this year we opened the first of these shows about the 17th-century printmaker Robert Nanteuil.

This exhibition centered around the portrait you see here of the writer and diplomat James Justinian Morier (ca. 1780-1849), attributed to the painter George Henry Harlow (1787-1819) and painted in 1818. At first glance the portrait is a theatrical depiction of Morier dressed in Orientalist clothing, but in fact there is some historical accuracy to his clothing as representing what men wore in the early years of the Qajar dynasty (1794-1925) in Iran. Morier was part of the British diplomatic service that sought to establish a peace treaty between Persia and Britain during the years of the Napoleonic wars. Morier wrote and illustrated two travelogues about his time in Persia (published in 1812 and 1818), and then went on to have an illustrious career as a Romantic novelist with his most famous book being The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan (1824). The exhibition sought to contextualize the historical period in which the painting and his illustrated texts (including the image of the "Persian Breakfast" you see at top), while considering ideas of colonialism and Orientalism in the writings of Edward Said and Linda Nochlin. I curated with one of the students a supplementary section as well, focusing on a selection of Iranian ceramics from the collection.

It was quite a successful exhibition, and we produced an excellent online companion exhibition, including a series of essays by the students introduced by Baumgartner and me. This project was inspired by research I had done previously on this painting, having given two conference papers about it in Pittsburgh in October 2015 and in Raleigh in January 2017. It's a great tale of how a painting first draws you in because of its appearance, but the more you look into it and consider all the imagery, as well as the background of the sitter and his world, it shows how art can convey new ideas and still have an incredible lifeline 200+ years after the events in which it was first painted.

Books of 2018

The annual New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 came out a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were two books on the list this year that I already had an interest in: The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst (which I bought but haven't read yet) and Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (which I did actually read and found interesting, like a literary, Corot-like veiled-mist tale). Among the novels on this new list that intrigue me and are now on my Amazon wish list are The Witch Elm by Tana French, Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. One major book not on their list because it came out afterward--and which, of course, is now on my "to read" list!--is Michelle Obama's Becoming. AA is reading it, as is my friend MT, and both are totally absorbed.

The book cover you see above reflects what I would say is the best novel I read this year, The Handmaid's Tale [1986]. Even though I have not seen the new series, I decided to step into the infamous dystopian world created by Margaret Atwood over 30 years ago, and I was enthralled. The book is fantastic and frightening; it feels so real and plausible, particularly in light of how things are going these days politically. Even better, it's beautifully written, slow even at times, the protagonist paying attention to details and inner feelings and memories in a way that is haunting to read. Atwood announced recently she is writing a long-awaited sequel, about which I'm uncertain how I feel. Part of me is curious like others to know where Offred actually went and what happened to her, but another part of me worries the sequel will be too influenced by popular culture today and won't live up to the author's own masterful exploration into this disturbing futuristic, misogynistic world. Speaking of misogyny, last year about this time I was reading Madame Bovary and I still think it was a beautifully written novel and highly recommend it to people all the time. It even topped my list of the the best novels I read between 2014 and 2017! Other great novels that I read this year included: Julian Barnes's existentially obsessive biographical novel Flaubert's Parrot [1984]; Penelope Fitzgerald's community of miserable, hateful people in The Bookshop [1978]; the sad Everything I Never Told You [2014] by Celeste Ng, which was on the NYT 2014 list; and Ruth Rendell's foray into racism and murder with Simisola [1994]. I also read this year the mid-century classic Lolita [1955] by Vladimir Nabakov, and I absolutely hated this book, not even so much for the nauseating storyline but because the writing itself drove me nuts.

Since I wrote last year's post on Books of 2017, I have read 32 books. I finally took the time to read Sculpture: Processes and Principles [1977] by Rudolf Wittkower, with which I had familiarity but had not read in its entirety before now. It really is a fantastic overview about techniques in stone carving and modeling for anyone interested in knowing more about the great European sculptors of the past. Bridging the gap between art and biography, two of my favorites this year were Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World [2011] by Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, and self-described "tranny potter" Grayson Perry's memoirs, co-written with Wendy Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl [2006]. Another great biographical account was Richard Blanco's memoir For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey [2013], which I read after we visited the excellent exhibition of his poetry with photographs by Jacob Hessler in Ogunquit, Maine. In the realm of American history, I read Jon Meacham's new book The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels [2018], the cover of which you see here. This book was such a fascinating overview of highlights in American history from the colonial period through the 1960s, showing how so many of our great leaders, including Lincoln and FDR, enacted social change because of the influence of the people, social activists and civil rights leaders, the true "soul of America." The book is a great testament and response to the politics of today.

Right now, I'm currently reading two books. On the literary fiction side, I am finally reading Jane Austen's Persuasion, published posthumously two centuries ago. I am nearing the end and I am worried it won't have a happy ending! I'm also reading Richard Holmes's fantastic collective biography The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science [2010], reminding us that science was not the separate discipline we perceive it to be today, but part of the exploration of the natural world along with art, literature, and music in the decades before and after 1800. This book has made for some relaxing bedtime reading, before turning in and dreaming each night...