Review: Sculpture Victorious

Toward the end of December, I had included in my annual round-up of favorite art exhibitions Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901, aka the long-awaited Victorian sculpture exhibition. It was held in New Haven at the Yale Center for British Art, and currently is on show at Tate Britain. I'm actually a little frustrated because I wanted to see the exhibition again when I go to London in a few months from now, but the show is scheduled to close a week before I arrive. In any case, I'm very glad I had the opportunity to see it in its version at Yale, and I'm pleased to share that my exhibition review in the Spring 2015 issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide has just been published. This open-access, peer-reviewed journal is free to read, so you can see my review by following this link: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring15/ferrari-reviews-sculpture-victorious-art-in-an-age-of-invention.

The image you see above is one of the smaller, technical marvels in the exhibition, a hand-sized figurine of Queen Victoria made by a machine, a work that was but one of the many in the show that celebrated the union of man and technology during the Victorian age. Here is what I wrote about it: "Displayed in vitrines to the left and along the wall [in the entrance] were miniature, mass-produced representations of Victoria available to middle-class consumers, derived from official images of the monarch such as the busts [seen nearby]. One amazing feat of artistic, technical ingenuity, developed early in Victoria's lifetime, was the sculpture-reduction machine. Prototypes had been designed and utilized by James Watt and John Isaac Hawkins, but by 1828 Benjamin Cheverton had launched the most commercially viable machine. His replica of [Sir Francis] Chantrey's bust of the queen, in ivory on a stone socle, measures about 7 inches and dates from 1842. The carving arguably reveals its mechanical origins, but the delicacy in its handling and details is still extraordinary." (Image: Victoria and Albert Museum)

Art Exhibitions of 2014

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a few hours so I could finally see a number of exhibitions they have on at present. I confess I felt rather nostalgic walking through the galleries, remembering fondly my 7 years of having worked there, reinforced by lunch with my curatorial friend JD and coffee with my former library colleagues and friends CD & SP. The current exhibitions are all excellent. The Renaissance tapestry show of the work of Flemish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst will blow your mind when you turn the corner and see all the gorgeous tapestries installed down a long corridor. Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire is luxurious and fascinating for what could be a morbid topic. The room-installation of Thomas Hart Benton's 1930-31 mural America Today is amazing--you can almost hear jazz playing as the characters sway from one American scene to another. But the greatest part of my day was the exhibition on the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo's Adam, seen here, fully restored. In 2002 the pedestal for the sculpture collapsed and, horrifyingly, the ca.1490-95 sculpture shattered. After 12 painstaking years of intensive study, and utilizing new technologies, the object conservators were able to restore this life-sized statue to near-perfect condition. The sculpture is an exquisite piece, clearly an influence on Michelangelo's David, and important as an early idealized male nude sculpture in Renaissance art. The videos on the website and in the gallery amaze you to see how they successfully conserved and restored the sculpture.

This year the best exhibitions for me were all on sculpture. In addition to the Adam just mentioned, the Met put on two excellent sculpture exhibitions. One was on the works of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), who reinvigorated French sculpture during the Second Empire with a Baroque-style energy that excited and scandalized people of the day. Running earlier in the year at the Met was another sculpture exhibition, The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925, an excellent show that aesthetically changed one's mind about works you once might have considered to be little more than living room kitsch. At Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery, a great sculpture show was put on about Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), about which I blogged here. Finally, at the Yale Center for British Art, the long-awaited Victorian sculpture exhibition there brought together about 130 works that changed one's mindset about what defines sculpture and how it can be made. The show also demonstrated the power of the curatorial eye with a fine selection of finely-crafted statues, reliefs, and decorative objects in an array of media. The first work one encountered in the exhibition, as seen in my photo here, exemplifies the surprises of the show. This is a Minton ceramic elephant measuring 84 inches in height, part of a pair, that was first exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. I have a review of this exhibition being published in the spring, so I will share more when it comes out, but for now, here is what I wrote about this gorgeous majolica elephant: "The elephant reveals a high degree of craftsmanship that demonstrates the successful union of man and industry, but it also has a deeper meaning. Displayed as part of a cultural parade, its empty howdah decorated in Mughal textile designs and awaiting a royal occupant, the tamed elephant represents the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown: India and all its riches. This work in the foyer thus foreshadowed others in the galleries of Sculpture Victorious: masterpieces of human and industrial design, and socio-political symbols of the British Empire."

If I had to choose my favorite exhibition of the year, however, it would be, without a doubt, Kara Walker's sugar-sculpture installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: A Subtlety: or, the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Walker is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and in this work she went beyond anything she had done before. Commissioned by Creative Time as a temporary installation, before the building was scheduled to be demolished, Walker designed a massive, sugar-coated, sphinx-like creature with the body and facial features of an "Aunt Jemima" type, to remind visitors of the intricate ties between the West's love of sugar and its intertwined history of slavery. The work was powerful and had lines of people waiting to get in. A group of friends of mine all went together to see it in June, and we were mesmerized. There are numerous images online that people took, so I'm only sharing here one I took to show the scale of the sculpture in the warehouse and the diminutive nature of the people around it. As time passed, the sugar gradually changed color, and the surrounding molasses "little black Sambo" boys melted and fell apart. After you were in the warehouse a while, the smell of the sugar and molasses became so sickeningly sweet you had to leave and get fresh air. This was all part of the artist's intent, to create a temporal, multi-sensory sculptural environment. When the show closed, most of the sculpture was destroyed (what had not disintegrated on its own already), although there is at present at Sikkema Jenkins an after-show that exhibits her sketches and designs, and an arm Walker kept as her own personal souvenir. This sculptural installation was truly a tour de force of artistic achievement, for the artist and the audience.

Aside from sculpture exhibitions, one major art exhibition highlight for me was Golden Visions of Densatil: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Asia Society. This historical monastery and its Buddhist treasures was constructed in the 12th century but destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution. The installation included discovered and recovered treasures alongside historical photos, but the most amazing part of this exhibition was having the opportunity to witness the monks make a sand mandala. This was an ongoing event for 5 days with 5 monks. You would expect it to be solemn, quiet, and peaceful. On the contrary, the monks were very engaging with visitors, including taking photos with them. They often laughed too, but then quickly would return to their back-breaking, eye-straining work of constructing this mandala. The most amazing moments were when they would help one another, knowing that one had more expertise than another, and they could share in the responsibility of building this sand mandala together. Their humanity made this a very spiritual experience. You can watch a great time-lapse video of them making the sand mandala here.

Other exhibitions from this year worth noting included:
** Pre-Raphaelite Legacy at the Met Museum, a small but groundbreaking show for them to finally acknowledge the accomplishments of these Victorian artists;
** Beauty's Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America at The New-York Historical Society, about which I blogged here;
** At the Guggenheim Museum, the fantastic multi-media exhibition on Futurism, Italy's modernist art movement, and the riveting photographs of African-American feminist artist Carrie Mae Weems;
** Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus in Munich (although I guess technically I have only seen it "in process" and will have to wait until early January to see the final, full exhibition!);
** And my dear friend and colleague Meera Thompson at Atlantic Gallery.

I would be remiss if I forget to mention my own two small, curated exhibitions--15 Minutes: Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy and Off the Grid: Beyond the Noise--both of which I thought were rather well done...if I may say so myself.

UPDATE (12/14/14): One of the blockbuster exhibitions of the year, that previously had opened in London and is now on here in NYC is Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. Everyone I know who has seen it loves the show, and it has been on my "must see" list, but I dread going to MOMA because of the crowds so I wasn't sure what to expect. Fortunately, AA and I decided to make the trek there today and it actually wasn't as bad of a crowd as I anticipated. The exhibition is very good, demonstrating well how Matisse used paper cut-outs and collage as a form of painting unto itself. It is a smart show about materiality, color, composition, and artistic technique. We also had a chance to pop into the Robert Gober exhibition. He is one of those contemporary artists I typically don't appreciate much, but this retrospective helped change my mind a bit with his theme-and-variation sculptural objects and large-scale installation spaces. It was all rather tongue-in-cheek and clever, I must say, so I do have a better appreciation for Gober now.

MWA XIV: Furse's Diana

Few people know much about Charles Wellington Furse. I certainly never heard of him until very recently. British-born, he died in his mid-30s, soon after painting the work you see here, Diana of the Uplands, 1903-04. The model for the picture was his wife Katherine, and according to the Tate's website she recorded that her step-mother-in-law helped create the wind effect, and the greyhounds were hired specifically for the picture (one black dog and one white dog, although Furse combined their coloring). The title refers to classical imagery of the ancient Roman goddess Diana, who was depicted in art as a huntress accompanied by dogs. This genteel woman is meant to be a modern-day Diana, one who may lead the dogs to a hunt in the Highlands, but who would never carry a bow-and-arrow or a rifle to actually hunt, as that is the work of men. This is a modern-day portrait of opulence and refinery, a Gilded Age homage to womanhood among the British upper middle classes. The color palette and brushstroke, as well as the portrait style, clearly shows the influence of Furse's contemporary, the American society portraitist John Singer Sargent. But there also is a feeling of Grand Manner portraiture that reaches back to the eighteenth-century style of Thomas Gainsborough. The loose brushstroke captures the wind-swept feel of the hills around the woman, and her taught arm reaches out to show her struggle to restrain the dogs, eager to hunt. Indeed, the dogs looking outside the frame for prey creates a perpendicular sense of vision that contrasts with "Diana" gazing at the viewer, bringing you the viewer into the hunt scene as well. It is a fascinating, introspective-yet-staged portrait that suggests a particular moment in time.

I never would have chosen this picture as this month's MWA had I not gone this past Friday to see the exhibition Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century at the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibition is ambitious, arranged on two floors, and incorporates paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, decorative arts, fashion, and audio/video works. It ties in well with the popularity of Downton Abbey, but that is a coincidence, as this exhibition was planned long before the show ever aired. In the US, however, how many actually know what "Edwardian" means? It is exclusively British in that it refers to the short reign of King Edward VII (Queen Victoria's heir) from 1901-10, although it stretches Edwardian back to the mid-1890s and up to World War I. Much as the term "Victorian" is fraught with problems because it lasted 64 years, "Edwardian" equally is problematic because, for such a brief period of time, the world and cultural world expanded in ways too difficult to define by a single style. Indeed, one problem with the exhibition itself is attempting to define what Edwardian even means. I left feeling more confused because all the thematic arrangements and numerous works of art demonstrate the diverse approaches artists took with different ideas and the lack of centralization that is "Edwardian." But then again that was perhaps the curators' point, to problematize that idea and move beyond it. I also was surprised that, despite the text-based acknowledgment of the British Empire reaching its height during the Edwardian period, there is very little international art or cultural objects to demonstrate the global impact of British imperialism and its subjects. Nor is there a sense of the working classes or anyone other than the highest echelons of society (hence the "opulence" part of the exhibition). What does make the exhibition exciting and refreshing, however, is the introduction of new ideas, artists, and works that were popular a century ago in the London art world, such as Furse and the portrait above. The pictures by Sargent shine (as always, he was a brilliant artist). Photography is brought in beautifully with rare autochromes (earliest glass-based color photographs) and the thematic arrangement of society photos showing off the first motor cars like equestrian portraits of the past. All in all, the exhibition is interesting in showcasing heretofore little-known works and artists, and putting together a large number of themes that show how many ways the Edwardians celebrated their cultural life. If this exhibition accomplishes anything, hopefully it will be the opening up to future scholarship further examination of the areas and ideas not seen in the exhibition, so as to better demonstrate how fascinating this world just before the outbreak of World War I actually was. Indeed, the charm of Downton Abbey isn't so much what's happening upstairs, but what's happening downstairs and outside the walls of the estate too.

Random Musings 10

I'm heading to Florida for a dysfunctional family Christmas. If you're wondering if this is a picture of my relatives, it's not, but I swear if my lesbian cousins (the DG-JBs) were to ever really let loose, I'm convinced they would be just like Edina and Patsy (more on them below). I've been saving up a bunch of links and posts to blog about, so enjoy this Random Musing.

The Guardian has an interesting interactive guide that allows you to zoom in and find out more about drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, in conjunction with the National Gallery's current exhibition about his years at the court of Milan.

When I was at the YCBA, my co-visiting scholar was Georgina Cole, who received her PhD from Sydney University in Australia. She was there working on a project relating to the senses in 18th-century British painting. She's also started a new blog/website, Early Modern Art Network, which focuses on news relating to art from the 17th and 18th centuries. She's transcribed a funny 18th-century letter to the editor from an enraged parent about how having his children trained to be artists had made his life miserable: "When I the other Day found that Remonstrance was in vain, and rage exerted without Effect, and clasped my Hands and sighed with pure Vexation, my Daughter told me I looked like the Soldier in Belisarius; my eldest Son said I was more like West’s weeping Grenadier, and my youngest, a little Imp about ten Years of Age, got into a Corner of the Room with his Chalks and blue Paper to copy my Face, his own Father’s Face, Sir, for a Head of Despair."

I've blogged about the World of the Year in the past, but unfortunately we now have conflicts depending on the source as to what the actual word of 2011 is. Dictionary.com had declared "tergiversate" to be the annual word (huh?), but now Merriam-Webster claims the word of the year is "pragmatic," based on the number of people who searched for that word. Complicating matters is the Oxford English Dictionary, which apparently declared "squeezed middle" the word of the year, never mind that's a phrase, not a word.

Thanks to my dear friend SVH, my latest sci-fi obsession is Farscape. Yes, I'm a little late to this, as it's been off the air for a while, but it's fun. A pregnant bio-ship with a sexy lost human and escaped alien prisoners, none of whom know or trust one another? What a fun concept!

New York magazine has declared 2011 to be the year in which male bodies were exploited in the movies, such as Chris Evans here in Captain America. There is a rather lovely slideshow of images worth seeing on the site, although I do find it odd that they all look alike (never mind why  Evans insists on shaving his chest hair). Unfortunately, my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor wasn't on the list, although I guess he didn't actually take his shirt off in any films this year (a first for him!). His film Beginners, with Christopher Plummer as his aging father who comes out of the closet late in life, was absolutely one of the best movies of the year. The Anglophenia blog put up a post earlier this year with video clips of all things Ewan, so check it out.

And unless you've been living under a rock I'm sure you've heard the news that--20 years after the first episodes premiered--Absolutely Fabulous is coming back with some new episodes with Edina and Patsy partying hard and Saffie scolding them the whole time. I can't wait! Here's a hilarious clip from the newest episode in which they trash-talk the Kardashians (who I still to this day do not understand why people think they are important!!). Enjoy, sweetie dahling!

28 New Haven Days: Part 4

If you've been following my posts about New Haven, you know that I've been lamenting about the crime here. Shermania commented on my last post about how he's in New Orleans right now and that their crime is much higher, and the RL-DGs have told me as well that since they moved to New Orleans, they have been warned about the crime and it has prevented them from exploring their neighborhood like they normally would. In a bizarre coincidence, The New York Times happened to publish an article last week about crime in New Orleans. This year they have had 175 murders, which is a ratio of 51 per 100,000 citizens. Compared to NYC, where it's 7 per 100,000, that is a shocking difference. The current population of New Haven is about 130,000, however, which means this city has a ratio of about 28 murders for the same number. Clearly it's not as bad as New Orleans, but it's certainly much higher than NYC. In thinking more about this, I've come to the conclusion that 2 issues here are at stake: (1) people (myself included) envision this area as a "New England college town" when in fact it is a city, even if it is small; and (2) NYC has become so safe it has given us a false sense of security about how other cities really are.  On Sunday, the PR-AMs came from NYC to visit, and even they were a bit surprised that we were asked for money by people out in the street about six times. Our favorite incident happened during dinner when a guy asked us for $3 and when we said no he went back to the bar where he was drinking a beer. Not surprisingly, he ducked out without paying.

After all is said and done, however, I cannot emphasize enough how fantastic my time here has been. The staff of the YCBA has been simply incredible. This really has been an amazing opportunity and it has helped me tremendously in my dissertation research. The picture above is a shot of the Reference Library where I spent most of my time in one of those study carrels on the mezzanine level, upper right. I'm going to regret leaving in a couple of days! And in spite of the issues with crime, I have ventured out and eaten a number of delicious meals here: vegetarian restaurant Claire's just across the street from the Taft (great soup), Big Bear Saloon (awesome burgers), Zinc Artisan (tasty personal pizzas), Istanbul Cafe (yummy Turkish), Zaroka (inexpensive Indian buffet), Woodland Cafe (tea & bagel sandwiches), Caseus Cheese food truck (delectable grilled cheese), and of course the old standby Atticus Cafe & Bookshop on the ground floor of the YCBA. There are many good restaurants here too, but I haven't had time to eat everywhere.

As far as my work goes, last Friday I gave a presentation to the YCBA staff. About 25 people showed up, which was great, and they provided boxed lunches for everyone. Although I gave an overview of my dissertation itself using PowerPoint, I focused more on things I've discovered since I've been here. What started out to be an almost 25-minute presentation turned into nearly 75 minutes of round-table discussion with excellent feedback, which I needed and greatly appreciated. One of the challenges of working on an artist from the past (in particular one who hasn't had a book published on him since an edition of his memoirs came out in 1911) is that there is a tremendous amount of information to cover, and so I must be very selective in what I work on, or postpone for a future project. For instance, in the process of working on John Gibson, I've found myself now also interested in his brother Benjamin (1811-1851), who also was a sculptor. This portrait bust of John is by Benjamin, made about the year 1838 (image: YCBA). Benjamin was 20 years John's junior and was never the success his brother was, but he did work in John's Roman studio, taught himself Latin and Greek, and published a few articles on archaeological discoveries in Rome. He was frequently ill, however, and sadly he died near the baths of Lucca when he tripped and suffered a concussion. He is buried in Lucca, but John also set up a memorial in his honor in Rome at the Protestant Cemetery where he himself was buried in 1866. My interest in him is probably not too much a coincidence; he was about my age when he died.

28 New Haven Days: Part 3

After my last New Haven post, I was starting to think that I may have overdone it in my descriptions about the urban environment here. Okay, so it's a city and it has crime and sharp contrasts in socio-economic classes. But the university area is of course delightful, as you can imagine from the picture I took here of a rather adorable Justice figure decorating the exterior of the neo-Gothic Yale School of Law. But then my friend JM was here for 2 nights (his mother had to have emergency surgery, so I was able to provide him with a place to crash; she's recovering!), and he agreed with me that he saw exactly what I was talking about. Having grown up in CT, he knows many other areas in the state are like this as well. Still, I thought, I must be exaggerating. After all, when last week citizens gathered in the park to light the big Christmas tree, they had a carousel, snacks, petting zoo, and so on. I had no idea there were so many children in this city! It couldn't be that bad. And then, I heard it again: this morning on the local news they announced that yet another murder had taken place during the night. This is New Haven's 32nd murder this year. So now I know for sure I'm not cracking up. Surprisingly though the community seems to getting upset as well. This evening I was coming out of the Beinecke Library and I heard/saw what must have been a crowd of over 200 people protesting and marching in the streets. At first I thought it was an Occupy New Haven event, but their chants corrected me: "What do we want?" - "SAFE STREETS!" - "When do want it?" - "NOW!" I rest my case.

Sticking within the enclave that is the museum and university environment, I joined the YCBA staff for their annual holiday party, which was delightful. I also went to a lunch-lecture last Thursday sponsored by the Material Culture Study Group. Becky Conekin, Senior Research Fellow in the History Department, gave a fun talk about '60s model Twiggy and mopeds. She based the talk on a series of photos taken of Twiggy in the late 1960s and proceeded to explore more about how the moped in the shots related to new ideas about youth, women, sexuality, and London as a new counterculture city. I also went today to an "Art in Context" talk at the YCBA, which is free and open to the public, although many people in the university art community come as well. Set in conjunction with the current exhibition Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770-1830, the talk was about this near life-sized painting you see here, Dancing Girl, 1772, by a little-known English painter named Tilly Kelly, who had a productive career in India. The talk was given by Gillian Forrester, Sylvia Houghteling, and Holly Shaffer, each of whom addressed different aspects about the painting, from the subject to details like the sari the woman wears. One of the more intriguing things about this picture was that conservation work and x-rays have shown that the subject originally was part of a much larger painting in which the woman was performing or paired with another figure, probably a man who was reclining looking up at her. The background was also completely different and repainted by Kelly, perhaps to suit a patron who decided he wanted just an exotic Indian woman. More research needs to be done to consider other aspects about this picture, but it just goes to show how art shouldn't be taken at face value. There is often much more going on behind the layers of paint, and its social history makes it a much more living thing.

28 New Haven Days: Part 2

The picture you see here is a view from the kitchen window of my flat at the Taft Apartments. It's an interesting sight, showing bank towers, church towers, and Occupy New Haven tents on the lawn. The visual diminution from right to left is almost poetic; it says a lot about this city. I have to confess, I'm not fond of New Haven. I've been here a number of times, and while the Yale architecture and environment is beautiful in all its 19th-century glory, the rest of the city leaves much to be desired. Once you leave the university area, it's a shady city. The extremes of wealth and poverty are bizarre. Whenever I turn right to head to the (only!) grocery store in the entire city, I start moving into the "bad" side of town. It's a little nerve-wracking at times. People at the YCBA have said things like "Don't walk too far in that direction after dark!" and "There was a shooting a block away from the museum a few weeks ago!" It doesn't instill a sense of serenity, as you can imagine. I went back to the City (in other words, NYC!) over the weekend, and it amazes me how I can feel 100% safer there than I do here. Don't get wrong, I'm not paranoid. But what do you make of a city where you're sitting in Starbucks and you overhear two police officers telling people they have to order drinks or they'll get thrown out for loitering, and then telling the manager about how dangerous this neighborhood is? Or, better yet, I get off the train last night and while waiting for a cab only see a number of police cars just near the train station. Turns out there was another shooting in that area just before I returned. According to the local news, that was the 31st murder in New Haven this year. If you calculate that statistically, that means there's been a murder here approximately every 10 days. And this is Yale? It's bizarre, but what can you do? Stay within the university environment as much as possible apparently. Life is much more enjoyable when you're living in the proverbial ivory tower. As I mentioned, though, the campus area itself is lovely, as my previous post showed with some pictures, and there are some fun surprises at times. For instance, I was returning from the grocery store this evening and bumped into one of the YCBA curators and we chatted for a few minutes in the street. It occurred to me that this was one of the joys of small city living, just randomly bumping into people you know and having a chat. I also spent a lovely Thanksgiving with my friends, the JJK-SPs, who live near here, and they said they'd take me around so I can see more of the surrounding area too, so I'm looking forward to seeing more.

But of course I am here to research and network, and that I have been doing. I've met a number of people and have been surprised to discover that the YCBA is bigger than I thought, but they all seem to know one another. I attended a lecture given by visiting senior scholar Clarissa Campell Orr, a well-published historian who is writing a biography about Mary Delany (1700-1788), maker of fascinating paper cut-out botanical collages, about which the YCBA recently did an exhibition. I have a computer work station in the library and have already worked in the Rare Book Room, plus I have access to resources in other libraries on campus. I've also had the opportunity to examine more closely the John Gibson busts in the collection, and they've now actually brought 2 of them out for the public to see, which is great (one of them being the unknown young woman about whom I blogged).

I've been asked to give a presentation on Dec. 16th about my research (yikes!). Fortunately, I've already uncovered some new interesting little tidbits of information, so that should help. For instance, Yale has digitized a travel diary written by Susan Horner (1816-1900). In 1847-48, she accompanied her sister Frances and newlywed brother-in-law Charles (later Sir Charles James Fox Bunbury, 8th Baronet, and Lady Bunbury) on a trip to France and Italy. An artist and historian, Horner later authored books such as Walks in Florence: Churches, Street and Palaces (1877) and Greek Vases: Historical and Descriptive (1897). In the 1850s and 1860s, she carried on a regular correspondence with Gibson and they saw one another socially in London and Rome on future visits, but it appears she first met him while on this trip with her family. Gibson had been living in Rome for 30 years at this time, so he was well-acquainted with everything the city had to offer, and he delighted in acting as a tour guide when it came to art. Ever the classicist, he always looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. The drawing you see here is but one of many examples of his sketches in which he explored Greco-Roman subjects. The drawing is from the Greek playwright Euripides and shows Antigone Discovered over the Dead Body of Her Brother (image: Royal Academy). I thought it would be interesting to share one of Horner's encounters with Gibson. On this occasion they visited the Vatican Museum, much like you or I have done in the past, traipsing through the same corridors she mentions as well. The only difference then was that there was no electricity, just natural light and maybe gas lanterns or candles for evening visits. Their particular visit together took place on April 10, 1848--exactly 122 years before I was born.

At three we called for Mr Gibson at his studio. He showed us a beautiful drawing he is making, and also some engravings from his works, very well executed; he then accompanied us to the Vatican, where Charles and Frances walked through the Gallery together, and Mr Gibson showed me its wonders. The galleries are very beautiful and very rich, and as we walked along, he stopped me at the most remarkable among its treasures. We entered the Braccio Nuovo which has been added of late years. Mr Gibson pointed out to me the statue of Minerva as the best time of Greek art. ... As Mr Gibson is occupied making a drawing for a bas relief of Hyppolitus, he examined these well, and satisfied himself as to the legitimacy of adding ears or horns to his creatures. I asked him, why it was necessary to confine himself to an imitation of the ancients, to which he replied, that when treating a Greek subject, it ought to be treated as a Greek artist would have conceived it, whereas, in Christian subjects the master is free to use what models he may please. (fol. 51v-52r)

28 New Haven Days: Part 1

I've been in New Haven for approximately 55 hours, and while I'm more settled now than when I first arrived, so far it's been a relatively quiet start. Friday night I was staying at the Graduate Club, and I spent that afternoon getting my Yale ID, then touching base with the YCBA staff and getting acquainted in more detail with the Library itself. Because yesterday was the annual Harvard-Yale game (I presume that's football?), plus with Thanksgiving coming up, I'm arriving here during an unusual time when many things are shut down for the week, including some of the Libraries. Nevertheless, I managed to keep myself entertained a bit this weekend. On Saturday, I moved into the Taft Apartments, which you see here. They were built in 1912 and named for Pres. Taft, who after his presidency taught at Yale and lived here. The apartments, however, are perhaps more famous because they're next to the Shubert Theater, which historically has been a testing ground for plays before heading to Broadway, but these days seem to be stuck doing revivals and seasonal works like A Christmas Carol in early December. The Taft has made an appearance in more than one film too, like All About Eve (1950), when Eve (Anne Baxter) is performing at the Shubert and she is confronted in her Taft apartment about her own past. (If you haven't seen this movie, get it now...it's one of Bette Davis's best films with her classic line "Fasten your seat belts--it's gonna be a bumpy night!") As for my apartment, so far so good, although my previous occupant wasn't exactly the cleanest person, leaving behind half-dirty dishes and her long black hair on more than one towel, including (shockingly) the kitchen dish towels which, alas, I did not discover until after I cooked my dinner and found hair in my food. (Yes...very gross.)

Shermania had written me about an exhibition at Artspace called Library Science, and I'm so glad he told me. It's the perfect combination of contemporary art and librarianship coming together in a way that would satisfy any bibliophile or library nerd. Candida Höfer was of course included, showcasing one of her large-scale photographs of libraries, but a number of other artists in the show were new to me and had some interesting ideas about libraries, books, and cataloging. Mickey Smith rephotographs found photos of people posing with faux libraries as backdrops, calling into question what the library is meant to suggest when it is not real. He also laid out an entire collection of hundreds of volumes of the Federal Reserve in a way that one quite literally walks over the books in order to look at his photographs. Considering this entire series is now available through online databases, Smith makes us rethink the evolution of information and the gradual disappearance of books in the e-publishing world as we walk all over them and what they historically have represented. Reynard Loki reenvisions the idea of cataloging with an ongoing project in which he indexes on paper his entire library by the first and last lines of each book he owns, and Erica Baum's large-scale photographs of subject heading cards from old card catalogs suddenly makes words like "Power" take on a whole new visual sensibility. This was an interesting exhibition for sure.

I was working on a different review today, but by lunchtime I decided I needed to get some air so I took a long stroll and wound up, oddly enough, in the Grove Street Cemetery. Yes, I admit, I'm a cemetery stroller. I find cemeteries to be very peaceful places where you can commune with nature (loved the birds and squirrels), but also look at the sculpture of the tomb stones and learn about people with whom I have no connection but who were important to someone at some time enough that a marker still exists to mark their remains. A number of the oldest tombstones here date from the 1700s and are now in very bad shape, but a number of 19th-century stones are still intact. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the grave for Eli Whitney (inventor of the cotton gin), but of all the plots I saw the one that caught my eye was that of Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901), which you see in the foreground of the image above. It's not that the sculpture is of great significance, but when you read the accomplishments of this man, most notably his becoming Yale's first Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit during a period when hardly anyone knew a thing about these languages, you realize he was an important academic figure. I had to look up more about him and discovered that his entire collection of books and manuscripts was donated to the Libraries and are the foundation for the Near East Collection. Looking in WorldCat, however, I was surprised to see what he had authored. While he did publish a few tracts on things like the Persian cuneiform alphabet (1849), he also wrote about Michelangelo (1861), and published a number of books about genealogy and his own family history. It makes you realize how specialized we've become in academia today, and it reminds me of the importance of making sure I don't get too pigeon-holed in my own work.

Gibson and the YCBA

I'm off to New Haven to begin my Visiting Scholar Award at the Yale Center for British Art, about which I posted back in April. This is not to be confused with the "Artist's Studio in Britain" seminar I attended there back in June (which I posted about here, here, here, and here). You'd think with all my traveling I would have packing down to a science, but it's not easy coordinating a wardrobe when the weather is moving from temperately chilly to cold but could warm up at any time. In any case, the fellowship is in support of my dissertation on John Gibson. The bust of an unknown young woman that you see here is by Gibson and from the YCBA collection. They date the marble bust to the late 1820s, which seems reasonable based on her hair style, but her identity is a mystery. One of my many goals for this trip is to identify her. I would like to think that it is a bust of Emily d'Aguilar Robinson from Liverpool. She was one of Gibson's earliest supporters. She was married, but she and Gibson may have had a bit of a love affair. She died in 1829 while he was in Rome, and he designed her funerary monument which is now in the Oratory at St. James's Cemetery in Liverpool. Of course, it's very possible the bust is of someone else, so that and many other Gibson mysteries await me as I spend some time doing research.

Fall Exhibitions 2011

New York magazine recently published their Fall preview issue and highlighted some of their favorite upcoming art exhibitions in the City. I'm not keen on their choices, although two are on my list of shows to see. As bklynbiblio readers know, I love Autumn in New York. The past few days have been glorious, with daytime temperatures about 70 degrees. I've had my windows open for days now it's been so delightful, with a slight chill in the air at night. It's invigorating after the brutally hot and humid summer we've had. In fact, I think I hear my sweaters waking up from their slumber... Autumn is the major kick-off season for exhibitions at museums, so it's not surprising that there are a few goodies I want to see:

• High on my list of late Summer exhibitions here in NYC is The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara at the Asia Society. This is a major loan show that almost didn't happen because of political relations, and showcases important ancient Buddhist art that has never been shown in the US before. They've also just opened a show commemorating the 150th birthday of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature, focusing on his accomplishments as an artist.
• Another major Asian art show, "Wonder of the Age": Master Painters of India, 1100–1900, is opening at the Met and promises to be quite an event with a number of beautiful works infrequently seen or appreciated in the US. The Islamic Art galleries are also reopening to the public after an extensive overhaul and redesign. The Met also just opened Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine, which focuses on cartoons and comics and will leave you laughing out loud.
• The Brooklyn Museum has some interesting shows opening. Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk--An Introspective looks like it will break the boundaries of objective sculpture in this contemporary artist's first museum exhibition. Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties should be delightful, celebrating America's Jazz Age. At the top of this post you see the 1928 portrait of gay artist Paul Cadmus by Luigi Lucioni that is part of the show (image: Brooklyn Museum). Speaking of gay art, I'm thrilled that Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the controversial National Portrait Gallery-organized exhibition on gay and lesbian art that I went to see in Washington, D.C. with RL last December, is opening here on November 18.
• MOMA's retrospective on Willem de Kooning has been getting good reviews, so I may venture over to see that, even though I'm not a big fan of his work. I always feel like a strain of über-masculine misogyny bleeds through his pictures.
• Contemporary photographer and conceptual artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has a show opening at the Pace Gallery.  Sugimoto is fantastic, one of my favorite contemporary artists. He merges Western and Eastern ideas together in ways that make you rethink what you understand about life, nature, and religion. His monochromatic seascape photographs are evocatively beautiful and eerie at the same time.
• I'll be at the Yale Center for British Art later this Fall, where I'm looking forward to seeing their exhibition on the 18th-century painter Johan Zoffany.
• I'm also heading to London soon and will be seeing a few exhibitions there too, such as Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery. Hardly anyone knows who he is today, but in his day Eastlake and his wife Lady Elizabeth Rigby defined artistic taste in mid-Victorian England.  He was President of the Royal Academy and the first Director of the National Gallery. The exhibition on apocalyptic 19th-century painter John Martin at Tate Britain should be great, but at £14 to get in, I'm hesitating with that one. The V&A also has a delightful show on the career and costumes of Annie Lennox, which I confess I really cannot wait to see (love her!).  So in the spirit of celebrating Ms. Lennox and the Eurythmics, we'll close with the 1983 video that started it all, "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This," a song which oddly enough my mother absolutely loved.

Artist's Studio in Britain (Pictures!)

I thought I would share a few photos from the seminar last week. My thanks to fellow "seminarian"(?!) Alexandra Courtois for letting me use these digital images she took. The one above is Mark Hallett discussing with us Reynolds's portrait of Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Love for Love by William Congreve, 1771. (You'll recognize the back of my head in the lower right.) The image to the right is a collection of some of the 18th- and 19th-century sketchbooks and portfolios we looked at in the study room. Below is a picture of Sarah Turner talking about direct stone carving with Barbara Hepworth's Biolith, 1948-9, as our object of discussion (Alex digitally altered that image a bit). The last image below shows us learning hands-on about pigments in the paintings conservation lab.

Artist's Studio in Britain (Part 3)

The modernist trajectory in art typically positions the artist as a single creative genius who does only original work and works alone without assistants. While certainly there are artists who fit this mode of production (e.g. Van Gogh), by and large the history of art production has been the artist’s studio in which assistants helped make art in the master’s name. This was, in fact, a necessity, especially for sculptors. Few artists could have been as productive as they were without studio assistants. People like to believe that Auguste Rodin made all of his sculptures himself, and photographs of Rodin show him working as such, but in fact he could not carve marble and he used a foundry to make his bronzes. He relied on studio assistants to make all the works one thinks of as "by Rodin." This in no way diminishes the importance of the work in the artist's name, however, for artists frequently had the initial idea (drawing, model, etc.), and then purposely worked in derivatives and copies for the market and for patrons. Once the viewer realizes this, the modernist trajectory of the single artist working alone becomes an anomaly, not the standard of art historical practice.

Sculptors had large studios and numerous assistants, and during the seminar last week we had 3 sessions on sculptural production, led by Martina Droth and Sarah Turner (Lecturer, Univ. York). In the painting you see above by Mary Moser, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823) is seen wearing the clothes of a gentleman, but modelling in clay a poetic subject based on antiquity (image: YCBA). This picture was painted upon his return from a 10-year sojourn in Rome. He brought back with him Italians who were experts in marble carving and thus established a commercially successful studio in London that specialized in figures after the antique and portrait busts of contemporaries that were purchased and collected like baseball cards (well, expensive baseball cards). In sculptural practice, Nollekens and others would make the clay model. Assistants would then enlarge it and use it to make a plaster mold. A plaster cast then would be made, and from this assistants would transfer the plaster into marble. The sculptor typically did the finishing touches on the finished statue. It may read straight-forward in print, but in fact it was a long, laborious task that one realizes never could have been done by the individual working alone. Direct carving in stone, however, for 20th-century sculptors like Eric Gill and Barbara Hepworth, became a purposeful transition to a modern mode of production, although it is worth noting that even Hepworth had studio assistants later in life, a fact she herself tried to deny in the modernist search for individuality. This is just talking about stone carving. Let's not even get started on bronzes, which are a whole other ball of wax ("lost wax technique" in fact!).

The above image of Nollekens, however, also touches upon another topic that we discussed during the seminar: the artist him/herself. There are a surprising number of painters and sculptors who depicted themselves as subjects or were represented by others. Some are shown at work, by direct observation or as an imaginary subject. Other times, however, these artists are shown simply as individuals, leisurely artists whose paintings and sculptures surround them as if to suggest they were geniuses who made art happen without any sense of labor whatsoever. Such is the case for many late Victorian artists such as Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Millais and so on. Chloe Portugeis (PhD Candidate, Yale) gave a session on photographic representations of these artists published in journals such as The Strand and The Magazine of Art, noting in particular the conflation between their studios and palatial homes (e.g. Leighton House, about which I’ve blogged before) and how these men came to be seen as celebrities in their own right.

On Friday, the participants gave brief presentations that related to works in the YCBA collection and/or their dissertation topics. Working in the study room, Esther Chadwick (Yale) spoke about the printmaker’s studio practice, Alexandra Courtois de Viçose (Berkeley) spoke about published editions of Lady Hamilton’s theatrical poses, Roo Gunzi (Courtauld) spoke about artists working outdoors and tied this to her dissertation on the Newlyn artist Stanhope Forbes, and Benedicte Miyamato Pavot (Paris) spoke on 18th-century artists' trade cards which were used to advertise themselves as art instructors. In the galleries, John Cooper (Yale) spoke about a bust of politician Charles James Fox by Nollekens (image: YCBA), Meredith Gamer (Yale) led a discussion on a print after a painting by Johann Zoffany on the members of the Royal Academy in a life class, and Kaylin Weber (Glasgow) talked about a portrait of Benjamin West by Thomas Lawrence. Back in the classroom, PowerPoint presentations were given by Bradley Bailey (Yale) on 19th-century Japanese prints and artists who trained in the West, and by David Pullin (Harvard) on the Stubbs and Wedgwood collaboration, tying this to his dissertation on 18th-century images that repeat in French paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and other media. I presented on John Gibson’s studio in Rome.

We wrapped up the seminar with a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday and we had a fantastic lunch in the Petrie Court Cafe. Indeed, it is worth noting that even though there was a lot of work during the week, we also had fun down time, including a great dinner hosted by Mark Aronson at his apartment (which, after a number of bottles of wine, somehow became an international hat-wearing party...you had to be there). Everyone seemed satisfied and pleased with the week of activities, and there are now plans to continue the conversation with a workshop next summer in York, England. On a personal note, I have to say that the opportunity to meet new people and reacquaint myself with others, and to learn so much more about British art production during this period, has been an incredible opportunity, and I tip my hat in thanks to the Yale Center for British Art for including me in this seminar.

Artist's Studio in Britain (Part 2)

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) has been playing a starring role in the seminar this week. Two of our instructors, Mark Hallett and Matthew Hargraves (Associate Curator and Head of Collections Information and Access), are specialists in 18th-century British art, so the world of the first President of the Royal Academy and his colleagues directly relates to a discussion of the artist’s studio in Britain. It has been refreshing for me to hear much of this, since Reynolds is critical to the history of British art, and yet heretofore I’ve had little opportunity to spend this much time looking at his paintings and thinking about his artistic practice. The image you see here is an unfinished portrait of Mrs. Robinson, ca. 1784, from the YCBA collection. I chose this image because it encapsulates much of the discussion that has been taking place the past few days. As a portrait, it exemplifies but one of many of the society sittings that Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, and others all specialized in. Despite the hierarchical insistence on the primacy of history painting, in fact portraiture dominated Royal Academy exhibitions in the 1780s, from as much as 1/3 to 1/2 of all works displayed, as Marcia Pointon has shown in her book Hang the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (1993). Hallett has done further research into Reynolds’s oeuvre, showing that in his portraits of women, nearly 50% of them show them with turned heads, a new approach to portraiture that would have been recognized as innovative by contemporaries. The turned head could suggest something about introspection and absorption, but feminists also could see this as the woman with independent thought, not simply an object of desire. The work here also is useful because it is unfinished and as such shows the sketch Reynolds made and the layering of paints to create what would have been the finished portrait. Why it is unfinished we do not know. It could be because Reynolds disliked his progress, but more likely it is because the sitter changed her mind or stopped paying for the work (which was more common than one would think).

Painting was labor. Unlike with a digital camera, an image didn’t just magically appear before the viewer. It took numerous sittings, the layering of paints, and time to allow each layer to dry. And yet with the layering of colors and the application of varnish, over time magic did occur. A persona, captured in a mode of idealized beauty or heroic achievement, did appear on the canvas, captured if not for infinity then for at least as long as the canvas would survive. As we also discussed, however, Reynolds was known for experimenting with his paints, and it was not uncommon for his pictures to fade, that he had to repair them in his own day. This problem still exists with some of Reynolds’s pictures and it is up to conservators to figure out ways to slow down if not stop the damage before all color fades completely.

The role of pigments and the formation of color was part of another great session we had on painters’ materials. Tubes of paint as we know them today didn’t exist until the 19th century century, so part of being a painter was mix your own paint colors, a task which frequently fell to young studio assistants. In Reynolds’s case, however, he often mixed his own paints in a conscious attempt not to share his color secrets with anyone. Mark Aronson (Chief Conservator of Paintings) and Jessica David (Postgraduate Research Associate) gave us a fantastic overview of pigments in the paintings conservation lab and we even had an opportunity to blend colors. I confess that the chemistry and other sciences in the making of art is still a mystery to me, but I was comforted by the fact that we had discussions around the notion that even in art history the making of art is something that has passed on to conservators and restorers because most art historians today specialize in the social history of art.

In our discussion of sketchbooks, we had another enjoyable opportunity to work hands-on with a number of 18th- and 19th-century sketchbooks by amateur and professional artist, from Romney’s and Flaxman’s sketchbooks from their travels to Rome, to a naval captain named E. V. Porcher who designed a portfolio of exotic watercolor images of south and east Asia during his time there on assignment ca. 1850. We discussed and practiced using optical devices (camera obscura, the Claude glass, and the camera lucida) in order to understand how they were used by artists to capture the true-to-life landscape and craft it into the picturesque. We also had an engaging talk about painting treatises, in particular Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715, reprinted 1725), which was read by every British painter of that century in an attempt to understand why being a painter was important to society and how education and good moral behavior would assist the painter in understanding the psychology of his sitter when painting portraits. There was much discussion about sculpture as well, but I’ll save that for next time.

Artist’s Studio in Britain (Part 1)

I’m in New Haven for the week-long seminar "Making Art, Picturing Practice: The Artist’s Studio in Britain, ca. 1700-1900" at the Yale Center for British Art, an event about which I first posted not too long ago. The seminar began informally yesterday with a guided tour of the exhibition Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance on its last day. I’m very glad I had a chance to see this show, and the tour was useful, not as a chronological history of Lawrence’s life and career, but as a close study of a few specific works in which we considered how Lawrence was both innovative and a leader in portrait painting from the 1790s to the 1820s. One of the pictures in the show was the work you see here, his portrait of Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby, which is owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is one of my favorite British paintings in the collection there. Farren was a comedic actress and mistress of the Earl of Derby, whom she married a few years after this portrait was exhibited in 1790 at the Royal Academy. It was Lawrence’s entree into the London portrait painting business and was received well by viewers. Farren appears as if she’s walked onto a stage or garden, and positions her head and body in such a way that she smiles coquettishly and seems to be flirting with the viewer. She is slightly off-balance and asymmetrical, which adds to the charm of the work. The virtuosity of his brush stroke is delightful in his ability to capture the white satin dress, the brown leather glove, and the spot of blue ribbon decorating her fan. I’ve always loved how Lawrence has the dress float to the bottom of the canvas, forcing Farren into the viewer’s space. One of the things we discussed during the tour was that pictures like this were often hung "on the line," resting literally on a railing that ran 8 feet high in the exhibition room at Somerset House, with the top of the frame leaning outward toward the viewer. What this suggests then is that Lawrence quite consciously used features in the painting like the trailing hem of the dress and the white shimmer of fabric to draw attention to his work in a room that would have been overcrowded with hundreds of pictures on display one beside the other. Farren’s presence would have dominated the viewer’s sweeping vista of the works on the wall.

There are about 10 doctoral students participating in the seminar this week. A few are from Yale, but others are from Harvard, Berkeley, the Courtauld, and other institutions, which is giving us all an opportunity to network and learn more about what others are working on with regard to British art. Our primary instructors (I call them that liberally as this is more of a discussion-based seminar than a series of formal presentations) are Martina Droth (Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, YCBA) and Mark Hallett (Prof., History of Art, Univ. York, England), but we have others giving lectures and leading discussions this week.

Our sessions began today with a consideration of the growth of London and how artists changed neighborhoods from the mid-1700s into the early 1900s as society moved to ever further westward. We also discussed apprenticeship in the studio, how young artists who showed talent were sent to work for masters and learn from them. They would live with the artist in exchange for payment from the family for the apprentice’s training. We also looked closely at a selection of artist training manuals and sketchbooks, showing how apprentices would learn by copying from engravings, then casts, and slowly working up to the living model. The foundation of the Royal Academy school in 1768 offered new opportunities for students to be educated in the basics of draftsmanship, although they still learned the craft of painting in studios. By the mid-19th century, however, this model of pedagogy had evolved with a new emphasis on industrial and graphic design, specifically new state-organized institutional learning centers following the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the mandate to improve British design. We wrapped up the discussion with a consideration of how these new reform movements spread to places throughout the British Empire such as India and impacted local cultures there as well. All in all, the first day has been filled with an incredible amount of information, and having had opportunities to look closely at 18th- and 19th-century books and works of art is always a treat. Topics over the next few days will include sculptural practice and the representation of the artist in the studio, so stay tuned for more...

Art Websites of Interest

I've been visiting a few brand new art-related websites that I thought I would share. For instance, I was thrilled to hear that the Yale Center for British Art has relaunched their website and included, for the first time, a database with digital images for all public domain paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, etc. in their collection. The image you see here of Leighton's charming portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie (1864-5) comes from the new database. Almost every museum is now working toward this goal (e.g. see the collection databases for the Met and the V&A), as it can only increase exposure to a museum's collection. In the case of specialized museums like the YCBA, an online collection database is even more important because it allows people to discover works that people might not have ever known they had. The database launch coincides with an in-house special exhibition highlighting works from their collection. I'll be able to see that show and (finally!) the Thomas Lawrence exhibition when I'm there next weekend. Yale also recently released the incredible news that they are the first university to make available digital images from their museum, archival, and library collections free of charge for all purposes, including publication. From Yale's press release: "In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration." Works still protected by copyright will require permissions from the copyright holder of course, but this is an incredible advancement in the sharing of intellectual property, and it sets a challenging precedence for other universities to follow.

The newly launched website Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951 is a database that highlights the lives and working practices of British sculptors from the period of the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the Festival of Britain in 1951. Information on artists such as Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925) includes things like exhibition history, chief works, associated studio assistants and pupils, etc., helping to create an integrated understanding of how sculptors were not individuals working in isolation but part of a large production of individuals who interacted with in one capacity or another.

My friend and fellow Solomon colleague CC is once again tapping into her creative juices, this time returning to her former career as a practicing artist. She has launched a site where she is selling prints and collages of her work. She has some beautiful work there, so check it out.

And my friend and fellow PhD Candidate PR has joined the world of bloggers (something I've been telling him to do for years now!) with his new blog Architecture/Cosmopolis. Specializing in Beaux-Arts and classical architecture in America and Europe, he has already written some great posts on things like the recent cleaning of the facade of the New York Public Library and Art Nouveau architecture in Brussels (which bklynbiblio readers will recall is very recently near and dear to my own heart).

YCBA Visiting Scholar Award

I'm a regular visitor to the Yale Center for British Art, and I haven't had a chance to report until now on some exciting news about them and me. Stay tuned for that below. Yesterday afternoon I took a train ride up to New Haven, CT with Peter Trippi (editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine and co-curator of the recent John William Waterhouse exhibition). We were on our way to the YCBA to hear Elizabeth Prettejohn give the last of a series of public lectures on Victorian art that she had been doing all month. I had hoped to attend more of them, but I was actually in Europe at the time. Regular bklynbiblio readers know that Prettejohn's name makes appearances here from time to time. I admit it: I'm a fan. In her talk she focused on the idea of Giorgione (ca. 1477/8-1510), specifically how his work was an influence on Victorian painters such as Edward Burne-Jones and art critics such as Walter Pater. Almost no works are safely attributed to Giorgione. For instance, the ca. 1509 work above, Le Concert champêtre (Musée du Louvre), was attributed to Giorgione but it is now said to have been by Titian. Even in the 19th-century very few works were definitively attributed to Giorgione. Prettejohn argued that this obfuscation charmed Aesthetic painters into borrowing on his Venetian style so as to create pictures about beauty without subject or moral virtue. The talk was interesting, and there was a wine reception afterwards, with opportunities for networking. I was invited to join a group for dinner as well, which was very generous of them. I always find myself feeling a bit self-conscious interacting with all the bigwigs of Victorian art criticism (including Tim Barringer, Martina Droth, and Jason Rosenfeld), but it was a pleasant evening overall and well worth the trip. By the time I got the train and subway home, it was after 1am.

Now for the news. I've been selected to participate in a 1-week seminar that will be taught by Martina Droth (Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, YCBA) and Mark Hallett (Prof. of the History of Art, York University) at YCBA this June. The topic of the seminar is "The Artist's Studio in Britain, 1700-1900" and will be of great use to me in my dissertation research on the sculptor John Gibson. But the even BIGGER news is that the YCBA also has awarded me a 1-month Visiting Scholar Award. Much like the fellowship I received to the Henry Moore Institute last year, this award will provide me with housing, a per diem stipend, research facilities, and access to their fantastic collection and all the Yale University Libraries. I'll be there from November to December. I'm really looking forward to it.

The Monographic Project

I was privileged to be part of a group of about 25 art historians who were invited to the Yale Center for British Art for a closed seminar entitled "The Monographic Project: Exhibition, Text, Museum." The seminar, held on April 17th and 18th and organized by Cassandra Albinson and Imogen Hart, was an exploration of issues and concerns over art historical monographic exhibitions and books. Part of the discussion was defining the monograph, but essentially this topic refers to exhibitions and books that focus on a single artist's work. Historically, this has been associated with an artist's life; however, as was discussed at this seminar, the monographic does not have to be so directly biographical in nature.

The seminar began with a tour of an exhibition currently on display at the Yale University Art Gallery entitled Picasso and the Allure of Language. The tour was given by the curator, Susan Fisher. Its thematic focus was on Pablo Picasso's relationship with various writers, most notably Gertrude Stein, but also related to how Picasso utilized aspects of language in his own works of art. It was an interesting exhibition, with all of the paintings, drawings, and archival materials coming from the collections of Yale museums and libraries. Afterwards, there was a talk given by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art here in New York City. Elderfield discussed his own personal experience on the many exhibitions he has curated at MOMA over the past 30 years, one of the more recent being Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, which I saw and thought was quite good. Elderfield discussed some of the challenges of mounting monographic exhibitions, in particular those of living artists, and the lessons he learned as a result.

The second day's program was divided into two parts: painting and sculpture. The morning session had three speakers present their takes on ways of doing the monographic book. Gabriele Guercio spoke about the history of art historical monographs in the 19th century, providing a theoretical framework for the seminar that ultimately problematized the idea of what a monograph actually is, that in fact it always has been subject to interpretation by authors over time. Angela Rosenthal from Dartmouth University presented her work on the first woman elected to the Royal Academy, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807). Rosenthal's book, Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (Yale, 2006), approaches the artist's allegorical and naturalistic self-portraits in the context of portraiture and women at the time. The image you see here comes from the collections of the Royal Academy. It is an engraving after one of these self-portraits by Kauffman, here representing herself as the allegorical figure of disegno (drawing/design). Richard Wendorf, Director of the Boston Athenaeum, spoke about his work on Sir Joshua Reynolds, highlighting how the objects themselves became less important when compared to the transactional relationships Reynolds had with his clients. Wendorf's take on the monographic, then, relates to cultural and psychological relationships.

After lunch, we shifted to sculpture. Martina Droth, Head of Research at YCBA, gave an introduction to the problem of sculpture in art history, noting for instance its exclusion from most art exhibitions and the dearth of research done on sculptors as compared to painters. Christina Ferando, a doctoral student at Columbia University, spoke about her work on the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. Ferando's monographic take on Canova relates to how his sculpture was exhibited and displayed during his lifetime, and how this connects with perceptions about Canova and his work. Margo Beggs, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, presented her work on the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer, specifically Hosmer's use of photography to define herself as a sculptor. Finally, Cassandra Albinson herself spoke about her experiences with an upcoming exhibition at the YCBA about the French sculptor Jules Dalou.

The seminar was very interesting. There was plenty of time for discussions, question & answer sessions, and networking. I always find the networking for these types of events to be as equally important as the information itself. Ultimately, I feel that the seminar has helped me consider different ways of working on individual artists. I've encountered criticism from people at times about the kind of monographic work I do, primarily because people assume it's always about biography. I now feel as if I have a better handle on how to respond to these critics, because as we learned the monographic project can be interpreted in many different ways.

The other highlight of this trip to Yale was seeing the YCBA exhibition that closes soon "Endless Forms": Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. The exhibition celebrates the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) which altered people's perceptions about the origin of humankind with its ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest. The exhibition drew on a variety of examples: paintings of geological formations and animals (you've got to love Landseer's paintings of dogs!), photographs of tribal peoples, and examples of taxidermy and fossils that the Victorians collected to study nature and man. It truly was a fascinating exhibition and has gotten excellent reviews. The show is moving to the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in June, but you can preview the exhibition by going to its (very cool) website by clicking here.