DC Heading to the Bronx

My friend and colleague Deborah Cullen, who for the past 6 years has been Director and Chief Curator of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, has just been named the Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. ARTNEWS has written up a great piece on her new role, as has The New York Times. I've never actually been to this museum, I'm sorry to say, but over the past few years it has raised its profile and I am eager to visit because of some of the exhibitions on at present and opening soon. (My family, on my mother's side, is all of Bronx extraction, but I wonder if any of them had ever been to this museum before?) She lives in the Bronx with her husband, sculptor Arnaldo Morales, so it likely means a lot to the museum that she has been a resident in that NYC borough for quite some time now.

Deb and I are both alum of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, although she graduated about a decade before me so we only just met when I started at Columbia about a year after her. She is a major art critic and curator of the art of contemporary African-American, Caribbean, and Latinx artists; prior to role at Columbia, she worked at El Museo del Barrio. At Columbia, she successfully transitioned the Wallach Gallery to its gorgeous new space, a white-cube windowed gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts on 129th St. The inaugural show "Uptown" that she curated there, the first of what she has called a triennial, focused on NYC artists who work north of 99th St., so essentially the Harlem and Washington Heights area. The show was fantastic. She and I have served on each other's respective planning committees for the gallery and the permanent collection at Columbia, and she and I have worked together to secure some amazing new art work by contemporary artists in the permanent collection. John Pinderhughes, a fantastic Harlem-based photographer, was among those artists, and he took the photo of Deb you see at the top of this post. I'm thrilled for Deb as she moves onto this new position, but I will definitely miss working with her. Here's a selfie of us in Seattle in May 2014 when we attended together the annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

Commencement and Career News

 

Yesterday, May 23, was my graduation from the CUNY Graduate Center. During the ceremony, I had conferred upon me my hood as a holder of the Ph.D. degree and I received my diploma. The ceremony was held at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. I was so happy to have my cousins the DG-JBs there, along with my good friends AA and JM. I know Momma was beaming with pride from above, and Papà was there in spirit, as were a number of my close friends and family. It's a rather startling moment to march across that stage, hear your name called out, and receive the official notification of your degree. I admit I started getting choked up, but I kept it together, determined to hear my name called out and enjoy with pride my moment. I began the Ph.D. program in Art History in August 2005, and along the way took numerous art history classes, did foreign reading language classes in German and French, took a ridiculous number of exams along the way, then finally had the opportunity begin work on my dissertation, which you will recall happened just last month. And now it's official. I'm Roberto C. Ferrari, Ph.D. Afterwards, a group of 10 of us went out for a lovely dinner (with cocktails!) at Robert's in the Museum of Art and Design building on Columbus Circle.

What makes this moment even more amazing, however, is that I also have a new job. I had been getting very concerned for over 8 months that things were getting more and more difficult, and I started to panic wondering how I even would be able to pay my rent. I had applied for numerous jobs but nothing seemed to be working out. Finally, my networking, experience, and determination paid off (thanks in part to the ongoing support of a number of close friends too). In the spirit of graduation being a true "commencement" (a beginning, not an ending!), starting June 10, I am the new Curator of Art Properties at Columbia University, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. I am essentially in charge of the university's art collection, which ranges from ancient decorative arts and Chinese sculpture to photographs and public sculpture on campus. The job is a faculty-librarian position and has a strong educational component, but I also will be involved with conservation and digitization projects and working to publicize the collection as much as possible. I am absolutely thrilled to have been given this opportunity. Stay tuned on the blog though, as I'm sure there will be numerous Columbia-related art postings in the future!

For now, however, enjoy this short video showing my graduation ceremony with me receiving my hood and official congratulations (thanks, DG, for taking this video!). If for some reason you can't see the video, click here to see it on YouTube.

Doctoral Dissertation Deposited

Last Friday, I had final meetings, got about a zillion signatures, went up and down floors over and over carrying more papers for signatures, and paid a few required bills, but after a few hours of all this work my dissertation was officially deposited with the CUNY Graduate Center. In other words, it's all done! And I couldn't be happier. I don't expect too many people to actually read my 301-page dissertation. However, I thought I would at least put on my blog the abstract for it, which is a 2-page summary of what I've completed. I now present this to you for your reading pleasure. The picture you see here is Gibson's Hunter and His Dog, made for the Earl of Yarborough in 1847, now in the collection of the Usher Gallery in Lincoln, England. (For more of my posts on Gibson, click here.)

Beyond Polychromy: John Gibson, the Roman School of Sculpture, and the Modern Classical Body

by

Roberto C. Ferrari, Ph.D.

This dissertation is a study of the life and career of the British sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866), whose Roman studio near the Piazza del Popolo was a frequently visited site for Grand Tourists during the nineteenth century.  I argue that, for Gibson, classicism was modern, and thus he developed new methods for creating and disseminating the modern classical body in nineteenth-century sculpture.  Gibson is considered by scholars to be the first nineteenth-century British artist to reintroduce polychromy in marble sculpture, as exemplified by his best-known work, the so-called Tinted Venus, 1851-53, which was displayed in London at the International Exhibition of 1862.  Because this tinted statue challenged sculpture’s purity of form, the subsequently negative historiography of this work has obfuscated Gibson’s numerous other accomplishments in the history of nineteenth-century art.  In this dissertation I discuss many of his other free-standing marble statues of modern classical subjects, such as Cupid Disguised as a Shepherd Boy, ca. 1830, a popular work commissioned in marble nine times for different patrons, and The Hunter and His Dog, 1840-41, a statue considered by his contemporaries to be his masterpiece for its balance of idealism with a close study of nature.  I also examine a selection of his portrait busts and monumental statues, bas-reliefs, drawings, and work in other media, such as porcelain statuettes and engravings, for a broader perspective of his exploration of the modern classical body.  Rather than ignore his polychrome sculptures, however, I offer new readings of them to show how they intersected with these other important aspects of his career.

Although I focus on one artist and use published and unpublished archival sources to discuss Gibson and his work, my methodology is pluralistic.  I engage biography with nineteenth-century exhibition history and critical art reviews, and I link patronage and art production to gender studies and queer theory.  I also engage with sculpture in its international context, as Gibson himself would have been exposed to it in the cosmopolitan art center that was Rome.  Thus, the work of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, the two leading sculptors in the Roman school, are components of this dissertation, as are the works of native British sculptors such as John Flaxman and Joseph Nollekens to demonstrate what Gibson learned from his early teachers and how he evolved to craft his own version of the modern classic in Rome.  I contextualize his work with that of his contemporaries in Rome, such as the British sculptor Richard James Wyatt, the Dutch sculptor Mathieu Kessels, and the Italian sculptor Adamo Tadolini, for a better assessment of Gibson’s sculptural practices.  I also discuss his patronage by aristocrats like Queen Victoria and Czar Alexander II, politicians such as Sir Robert Peel, and bourgeois industrialists such as the Liverpool manufacturer Richard Vaughan Yates, as well as the global dissemination of his work during his lifetime, which was exhibited internationally throughout Europe, Russia, Australia, North America, and India.

In the introductory chapter, I establish my argument, that through a reexamination of Gibson’s life and career beyond his experiments with polychrome sculpture, one can better assess his importance to the history of sculpture itself by reconsidering how he redefined the modern classical body.  The second chapter is a biographical overview that demonstrates how Gibson’s roots in the British school of art influenced his ideas about classicism as a form of modernity.  Chapter three considers Gibson’s studio practice, from the close examination of his account books to his influence on his most famous pupil, the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer.  Chapter four focuses on the homoerotic male body in Gibson’s oeuvre.  An advocate of the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann,  Gibson created heroic and ephebic male nudes, such as Mars Restrained by Cupid, 1819-25, a work that suggests issues as diverse as homosocialism and queer subjectivity.  Chapter five discusses Gibson’s interest in reproductive media and how, in shifting his role from a hands-on sculptor to a designer, he explored reproductive technologies in cameo production, ceramics, and printmaking to disseminate images of the modern classical body to the rising bourgeoisie.  The final chapter explores Gibson’s legacy, including his influence on New Sculptors such as Hamo Thornycroft.  Ultimately, this dissertation argues that through a reexamination of the life and work of Gibson, one can begin to move past the pejorative sensibilities of Neoclassicism itself as merely historicist and reconsider classicism as a form of modern art in the nineteenth century.

Post-Dissertation Defense

On February 22, I posted about having finished the defense draft of my dissertation, with all its statistics. I'm pleased to announce that I had my actual defense yesterday, and I passed. (My friends and I did some imbibing last night to celebrate.) So, yes, you may now address me as "Dr. bklynbiblio"....uhm, I mean Dr. Ferrari. Well, actually, I'm not officially done yet. After a 2-hour discussion with my 4 readers, I have a number of changes and additions I need to work on in the dissertation, but fortunately there's nothing major. I hope to actually deposit the final draft in the next couple of weeks, and then it's graduation! It does seem strange that it was almost exactly 3 years ago that I took Oral Exams (see my Before and After posts), and here we are at the final stage. Upon hearing the news on Facebook of the outcome of my defense, my friend & colleague Carolyn Conroy wasted no time updating the "About Us" page of the Simeon Solomon Research Archive, adding my new title. Family members seem rather tickled by the idea that we finally have a doctor in the family. People keep asking me if I will use the "Dr" as part of my name, but I doubt it. American society sees "Dr" as a medical practitioner and to use it would give a false sense of who I am (in other words, I can't write out prescriptions). In the academic world, it's commonly used, but even then I have always preferred calling someone "Prof." In the UK, "Dr" is a noteworthy title for academics actually distinct from "Prof," higher in status than some professors in fact, so I can understand why it is used more frequently there. For me, I think Roberto C. Ferrari, Ph.D. looks rather chic and says exactly what I want it to say. And if you're wondering about the image above, it's Cupid Pursuing Psyche, a marble bas-relief from ca. 1840 by John Gibson (image: Royal Academy of Arts). Although I don't discuss this particular work in my dissertation, I thought it was a lovely example of his work to exemplify his achievements in sculpture.

The M.Phil. Degree

Which one of these things doesn't match the other? If you guessed the square on the lower left, you would be quite right. I went to school today to pick up my diploma for my M.Phil. degree (Art History), which is the newbie joining my B.A. (English) on the stand and 2 M.A. degrees (Humanities and Library & Information Science) on the wall. Too bad it's kind of plain looking compared to my other degrees with their fancy Gothic calligraphy. I actually received my M.Phil. on September 30, but it took them so long to prepare the actual diploma, I had forgotten all about it. In case you don't understand how all this works, in American universities the M.Phil. stands for Master of Philosophy and is the degree you earn when you've finished all Ph.D.-level coursework and exams. It means you're A.B.D. (colloquially, "all but dissertation"). Once I complete my dissertation and defend it, then I will earn the Ph.D. and you'll be able to call me dr. bklynbiblio. But I still have more to do to get there, and Lord knows I'm working hard at it. The dissertation is moving along slowly but surely. I have a tendency to obsess over what I need to do next in my life, to the total detriment of acknowledging what I've done so far. It was a pleasure then to set the diploma on my bookcase today, and to take a few moments to pat myself on the back and think about all that I have accomplished. It felt rewarding, and I even smiled. We all need to do that a little more often.

BQH Conference

A few weeks ago, while I was in Florida, the executive committee in my graduate program met and, I'm pleased to say, approved my dissertation proposal: "Refashioning the Gods: John Gibson, the Roman School of Sculpture, and the Modern Classical Body." As you may remember from a previous post on this blog, Gibson was a British sculptor who moved to Rome in 1817 and established a studio there, becoming one of the most important sculptors of his day. My dissertation will address how Gibson was both a classicist and a modernist, how his appreciation of ancient Greco-Roman art merged with his understanding of modern taste, and thus made him the successful sculptor that he was in his day.

In addition to my upcoming residential fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, and a travel award from my school, I was informed this week that I also have received another award: the Spero-Goldreich Dissertation Fellowship. The money from this award is going to pay my travel expenses to do research in London at the Royal Academy this fall. I am extremely grateful to the private sponsors of this award.

Before I leave for England, however, I'll be making a stop in Montreal first, where I will be delivering a paper at the British Queer History Conference at McGill University. I am on a panel session on 19th-century British art with my friends and colleagues Carolyn Conroy (on Simeon Solomon) and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (on Henry Scott Tuke). Christopher Reed from Penn State is our moderator. It should be an interesting conference, with talks by Jeffrey Weeks, Matt Cook, and others. You can see the whole program here.

You may be wondering how all this relates to the picture above. That is a photograph I took in April 2006 of Chatsworth, truly one of the most magnificent estates in England, still owned by the Duke of Devonshire and his family. The 6th Duke was one of Gibson's first patrons, and my upcoming conference paper will be about how these two bachelors negotiated the aspects of queer art patronage in the early 19th century. Here is the abstract for my paper.

The Sculptor and the Duke: John Gibson, the Duke of Devonshire, and Queer Art Patronage

During the winter of 1819, the Duke of Devonshire visited the Roman studio of the British sculptor John Gibson. At the time, Gibson was working on a seven-foot model of a sculptural group of two nudes entitled Mars Restrained by Cupid. The Duke immediately commissioned the work in marble. In the sculpture, the idealized warrior god and the ephebic god of love gaze into one another’s eyes as Cupid gently restrains Mars from brandishing his sword. Alluding to the pederastic tradition of ancient Greece, as well as the sensual aesthetics of the Biblical David as sculpted by Donatello and Michelangelo, Mars Restrained by Cupid is an example of early nineteenth-century queer art from the perspective of subject, artist, and patron.

Born in Wales and raised in Liverpool, the artist John Gibson (1790-1866) eventually made his way to Rome where he studied sculpture under Antonio Canova. Thereafter, he established a lifelong career in Rome as a British expatriate sculptor. Gibson came to count among his patrons Queen Victoria herself, but his legacy to art was the reintroduction of polychromy into sculpture with works such as the Tinted Venus, which premiered at the International Exhibition of 1862. Espousing the teachings of J.J. Winckelmann and the art of ancient Greece, Gibson produced interpretations of ephebic gods in marble, such as The Sleeping Shepherd Boy (1818) and Narcissus (1829). His patron, William Spencer Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858), inherited his title upon the death of his father in 1811 and began renovations at Chatsworth, including the construction of a sculpture gallery. Once the Napoleonic Wars had ended, he went on his first Grand Tour to Rome, and it was during this trip that he commissioned the statue by Gibson. He subsequently commissioned or purchased work from other sculptors in Rome, almost all of which were of mythological nude males, including Endymion by Canova and Ganymede with the Eagle of Jove by Adamo Tadolini. His arrangement of these works at the entrance to his sculpture gallery inevitably created a queer space through which one had to pass in order to see other works in the collection.

In this paper, I will consider the juxtaposition of Gibson’s sculptural oeuvre with Devonshire’s choice of art objects for this gallery, a queer space in which Mars Restrained by Cupid played an important role. Certainly it is true that representations of the nude male epitomized idealized beauty in Neoclassical art, and not all such figures are inherently queer in nature. However, art historians such as Thomas Crow have noted that there were homosocial artistic circles, such as the atelier of Jacques-Louis David, and that he and some of his students did paint subjects that pointed to the ancient Greek pederastic tradition. This spirit of homosexualism, according to Whitney Davis, demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century representations of same sex passion existed before the conscious manifestation of a homosexual identity occurred later in the century. Citing published and archival biographical and commercial information, as well as theories on the collecting and display of art, I will consider the sculptor Gibson and his patron the Duke of Devonshire as a case study for the existence of queer art patronage in Britain and Rome in the early nineteenth-century.

After Orals

Good news: I passed my Oral Exam! Hopefully that is the last exam I will ever take. I studied for about 6 months, I felt relatively confident about certain areas and hesitant about other areas, and I had practice sessions with co-students/friends. Yet, taking the exam still turned out to be an incredibly unpredictable experience that was both agonizing and rewarding. My thanks to KZ for being such an awesome study partner, and to RL, PR, and MS for giving me great practice sessions! For the record, my examining committee members were Profs. Patricia Mainardi, Judy Sund, and Sally Webster. Here’s the low-down on the images and issues.

Focus Area: Classicism in British Painting & Sculpture, 1785-1900 (note: I was only shown sculpture)
1) John Gibson, Tinted Venus (1851-56) and Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1874-77) [images above]
2) John Flaxman, Fury of Athamas (1790-94) and Francis Chantrey, Monument to David Pike Watts (1817-26)
Issues: modes of classicism, polychromy, marble/bronze, idealism/naturalism, ancient/Renaissance models, nationalism, classicism and modernity

Minor: American Art, 1750-1945
3) Albert Moore, Pomegranates (1865-66) and James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. III (1865-67) [note: Moore is British, but what is Whistler?]; issues: classicism/Japonisme, Aesthetic Movement, artistic training
4) Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (1770) and Charles Willson Peale, Exhumation of the Mastodon (1805-08); issues: history/genre painting, academic training, American identities
5) John La Farge, Kwannon Meditating on Human Life (late 1880s-1908) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial (1890-91); issues: Japonisme, Symbolism, decorative art


Major: European Art, 1750-1900
6) Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809-10), John Constable, study for Hadleigh Castle (1828-29), and Ernest Meissonier, Ruins of the Tuileries (1871); issues: Romantic/documentary ruins, nationalism, death/rebirth [note: always know the book cover images of your professors’ books!]
7) Joseph W.M. Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844), William Powell Frith, Railway Station (1862), and Claude Monet, Pont de l’Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877); issues: railway/industry, genre/landscape painting, light/color
8) Paul Serusier, Talisman (1888) and Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bellevue (1882-85); issues: Post-Impressionist modes of landscape painting, proto-abstraction in color/form
9) Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jason with the Golden Fleece (1808-28) and Auguste Rodin, Monument to Balzac (1898); issues: monumental sculpture, classical/realistic body
10) Jacques-Louis David, Death of Socrates (1787) and Eugène Delacroix, Barque of Dante (1822); issues: Neoclassicism/Romanticism, classical/Renaissance body types

Looking back on all this, I think some of these image groups included unusual works one rarely sees. In some ways that bothered me, but then again obviously that’s part of the experience of this exam. Because of my interest in British art, there were more British works than most probably see. On the other hand, no one showed me Pre-Raphaelite paintings because presumably they expected I would know those. Of the groups above, I did well with my focus area (British sculpture) and my minor (I was told I’m a “closeted Americanist”), but I had a more challenging time with #s 6-8 for different reasons (e.g. why 2 Post-Impressionist landscapes? ugh!). Keep in mind that by the second hour I was seriously losing steam (railway pun unintended).

So if you ever have to take an exam like this, expect the unexpected. As much as you may prepare for anything, you will not be prepared for everything. Part of this exam is to test how you can improvise and respond to works you may not have seen before or ever thought of paired together. Fortunately, the other half of the exam is addressing canonical works/issues you will know. That said, everyone’s experience will be different because everyone brings different skill levels to this kind of exam. The choice of examining committee makes a big difference too. But there is one piece of advice I received from a few people that definitely worked for me. When you see the images, breathe. Those few seconds will give you a chance to collect your thoughts and allow you to articulate how you want to respond to the images.

(Image credits: Walker Art Gallery, Tate Britain, Butler Institute of American Art, RJ Swanson on Flickr)

Before Orals

After months of studying, my Oral Exam in my PhD program will take place in 2 days from now. I posted earlier this year a description of what the exam format will be like. Needless to say, I am a bit anxious about the experience of the exam, considering how important this is in my program of study, but I want to take on this challenge. In that spirit, over the past few weeks I've been changing my profile picture on Facebook with details from various paintings looking for one that symbolizes my intent with regard to this exam. I've settled on the work you see here, Thor Battering by Midgard Serpent (1790) by Henry Fuseli, but I've temporarily retitled it bklynbiblio battering the oral examination. I finally had an opportunity to see this painting last summer at the Royal Academy and I still admire it greatly. It's a tour de force of 18th-century history painting in that it demonstrates Fuseli's talents through his use of foreshortening, perspective, and dramatic lighting to draw the viewer's attention to the powerful subject.

Fuseli was an ingenious artist (and not just because he painted dark, sexually-charged works like The Nightmare). Swiss-born, he went to Italy for his artistic training and was influenced by ancient sculpture, but seemed to find his greatest affinity with the spirit of terribilità associated with Michelangelo, as you can see in the exaggerated musculature of the nude Thor in this painting. The art historian William Vaughan has argued convincingly in German Romantic Painting that Fuseli was associated with Sturm-und-Drang, a literary movement affiliated with German writers such as Goethe that focused on emotions over rational thought. It is seen by many as one of the roots of Romanticism. Vaughan calls Fuseli's work expressive classicism, which I find an excellent way of demonstrating how he produced art that evokes both Classicism and Romanticism. Fuseli made his way to London and with his successful history/mythological paintings was elected a full member of the Royal Academy; this painting was his diploma work. He later became the Professor of Painting at the school. Here is more about the painting from the Royal Academy's website: "This mythological subject comes from the Icelandic sagas of the Edda, which were known in England from P. H. Mallet’s book Northern Antiquities (1770). Fuseli depicts the fable in which Thor rows out in a boat with the giant Hymir, shown cowering somewhat cowardly in the stern. Using an ox’s head as bait, Thor manages to fish up the Serpent of Midgard. In the top left is shown the elderly figure of the god Odin. Fuseli’s heroic figure wrestling with the evil serpent is given great grandeur and drama as it emerges from the inky background. Parallels have been drawn between this epic struggle and contemporary events in France. Fuseli was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution and Thor’s battle with the serpent could be seen to mirror the French people’s struggle against the ancien régime."

CAA 2011 in NYC

It seems odd to write the year "2011" already, but professional organizations are always thinking way ahead of the current year. The College Art Association (CAA) just had their 2010 conference last month in Chicago (which you may recall I contemplated attending but ultimately decided not to go, letting Sherman Clarke fill me in with his highlights of the conference), and now CAA is ready for next year's conference to be held February 9-12, 2011. They have released the call for papers.

This will be CAA's centennial conference, demonstrating the professional strength of the art history discipline for the past 100 years. Few people realize the rich history of art history. Samuel F.B. Morse (inventor of the telegraph) was also a successful painter. He was appointed the first Professor of Fine Arts at New York University in 1831, where he taught courses on the practice and history of art. The same school was one of the earliest to organize a department of art history in 1922. (I would tell you more about the history of my art history program, but after spending 30 minutes on the school's website, I cannot find out any information about it!)

Below are just a few of the panel sessions that seem like they will be of interest (click here for the official site for the call for papers).
**"Boston and New York, ca. 1910: Issues of Cultural Exchange" celebrates the CAA centennial by considering art historical exchanges between these two cities from 1900-1920.
**"Before the White Box: Museum Murals in the Nineteenth Century" addresses the role of wall paintings in institutions, an art form which was extremely popular in the 19th century but died out by World War II.
** "The Ethnographic Ruse: Early Erotic Photographs of Non-Western Women" considers how seemingly innocent (National Geographic-like?) images in early photography can also be seen as sexual commodities.
** "Through the Lens: Photographers and New York Skyscrapers" looks at the historic tradition of the now ubiquitous skyscraper photograph (hence the 1904 image above by Edward Steichen of the Flatiron Building, from the Met's collection).

HMI Research Fellowship

Last week I received some fantastic news. I have been awarded a research fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. You can see a picture of the institute above. The contemporary glass facade on a Victorian row house gives you a good sense of how they see them as a bridge between the past and the present. According to their website, the HMI "is an award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre and sculpture archive." They specialize in British sculpture, mostly from the late 19th century to the present, but also hold material dating back to 1800. They are affiliated with The Henry Moore Foundation, which was established in 1977 by the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986), a leading figures in 20th-century sculpture. His large-scale, biomorphic figures can be found in museums and sculpture gardens around the world. Click here for just one example from the sculpture garden at Perry Green, Moore's home in England. By sheer coincidence the Tate Britain in London is opening an exhibition of his work in a few weeks as well.

This is a one-month residency research fellowship, for which they provide housing. I will have time to use their extensive library and archive, and to view the sculpture collections at the HMI and the Leeds Art Gallery, all in the goal of doing more research on the work of the sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866). You'll recall that I also received from my school a grant for a research project on Gibson in Liverpool, so this extended period of time will be an incredible start to the next phase of my academic career. We're still coordinating the dates, but the plan is for me to be doing all of this in the fall.

The Spring Semester

The spring semester at school started this past week, rather late in the year actually. Fortunately, I am done with all my coursework. Most of my energy this semester will be focused on intense studying for my Oral Examination, which has been scheduled for the morning of April 22nd. This exam is the last major requirement of our program. Upon passing you receive an M.Phil. degree, which establishes your official candidacy as a doctoral candidate and acknowledges you are at the dissertation stage. While it is also my goal to turn my dissertation proposal in this semester, I need to focus first on passing this test. The exam is set up like this: 3 faculty members sit in a room with me for 2 hours and show me numerous pairings of works of art which I'm supposed to identify, compare and contrast, and discuss in the context of the major art historical literature on them. I could be shown anything within my areas. If one of the pairs is something like David's Oath of the Horatii (1785) and Couture's Romans of the Decadence (1847), I would be okay with that. If they show me a German Biedermeier painting, however, I'm screwed. My study partner KZ and I have been working dilligently on the 4-page bibliography for our major area: European Art, 1750-1900. There is also a focus area, which is a specialized component in which one is supposed to demonstrate advanced knowledge. Mine is Classicism in British Painting & Sculpture, 1785-1900. If that wasn't enough, I also will be tested in my minor area: American Art, 1750-1945.

All that said, I couldn't resist auditing a seminar this semester, which means I sit in on the lectures, but since I'm not getting a grade I don't have to do the assignments. My advisor, Patricia Mainardi, is co-teaching with Martina Droth from the Yale Center for British Art a great seminar called "The Artist's Studio in the 19th Century," which will focus on both practical issues like artists' education and training, and theoretical issues like images of artists in their studios as performative representations of the self (hence the 1905 image above taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin in his studio with assistants, from the Library of Congress).

So wish me luck: between working at my job and studying, it's going to be an important and busy semester!

The Fall Semester

Today was "back to school" day for me. I started in the PhD program in Art History in 2005. It seems like ages ago in some ways, and then in others just like it was yesterday. I've been taking 2 courses a semester, but for the fall I'll be taking 3, so I expect to be pretty busy. The good news is that this will be my last official semester for coursework (by "official" I mean for a grade). One class I'm taking is a lecture course entitled Watteau and His Legacy. We're studying the brief career of Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), the French artist whose name has become synonymous with the early Rococo and the fête galante, scenes of aristocrats frolicking in romantic gardens or actors and musicians performing for the viewer. The picture above is by him: The French Comedians from 1720-21. It shows actors performing in a melodrama. The picture is owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it probably will be hanging alongside other works for a special exhibition opening there 3 weeks from now called Watteau, Music, and Theater. Watteau was important for introducing this new subject matter into the art world at the time, and his untimely death at the age of 37 from tuberculosis helped jettison ongoing interest in his subjects, which were picked up by later French artists such as Fragonard and Manet.

My second class is a seminar entitled The Role of Travel 1750-1900, and it relates to how travel impacted the European and American art world at this time. The topics that we will be covering include: the Grand Tour (when wealthy aristocrats from England in the 1700s used to travel to Italy for extended visits to be "civilized" by the art there); Travel Books and Prints; the Railroad (how it became both a new way in which to travel, and a subject for art in the second half of the 19th century, such as works painted by Turner, Manet, and Monet); Artists' Colonies (rural colonies like Barbizon to urban colonies like the Nazarenes in Rome); National and International Exhibitions (e.g. the Great Exhibition of 1851, etc.); Orientalism and Primitivism (artists and their interactions with non-European cultures).

My last class isn't really a class but an independent study with my advisor, which means lots of reading and summarizing, then preparing an extensive annotated bibliography and proposal as it relates to the focus area for my Oral Examination in the spring and my ideas for a dissertation. I'm going to be working on 19th-century British classicism in painting and sculpture, and the career of John Gibson (1790-1866). Gibson was a British sculptor who lived in Rome for nearly 50 years. He was a member of the Royal Academy and counted among his important patrons Queen Victoria herself. I was pleased to see a few of his works, albeit briefly, when I was visiting Buckingham Palace in July. You may recall I gave a paper on one aspect of Gibson's career last November at Yale, but there's a lot more work to be done.