The Art Bulletin articles from December 1996

The Art Bulletin archives from December 1996

Aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art.
December 1, 1996... Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography Last summer I encountered two etchings done by Albrecht Altdorfer immediately prior to the destruction of the Regensburg synagogue and the expulsion of its resident Jews by civic order in February...

"Just like us": cultural constructions of sexuality and race in Roman art.
December 1, 1996... One of the greatest difficulties plaguing the study of Roman art is the persistent notion that the Romans were "just like us." This problematic idea forms the premise and subtext of five centuries of classical studies. If the Renaissance had a...

Triangulating racism.
December 1, 1996... Race was disproved as a coherent scientific category by Franz Boas in 1928, but racism prospers nearly everywhere.(1) Among scholars, the simple but valuable observation that race is a biological fiction but racism a social fact has gained...

Putting a face on difference. (Wilson Homer's painting, 'Prisoners from the Front')
December 1, 1996... I would like to situate this essay within the context of the "culture wars" that have been raging across the country with particular ferocity since the late 1980s and that have affected and/or been fueled by the educational enterprises in which...

Erratum. (correction to 'Intention(s)' in LXXVII, no. 3, 1996 issue)(Correction Notice)
December 1, 1996... A printer's error in the last issue caused footnote 12 of Joseph Kosuth's "Intention(s)" (Art Bulletin, LXXVIII, no. 3, 1996, 412) to be unintelligible. It should have read as follows: 12. After nearly thirty years as an artist, I have recently...

Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin.
December 1, 1996... Berlin was the preeminent building site in National Socialist Germany through the late thirties and into World War II. Its position at the center of state and Party architectural policy was achieved both through Hitler's direct interest in the...

Norman Rockwell and the fashioning of American masculinity.
December 1, 1996... There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for Repin that the [Soviet] peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not...

The Duc d'Antin, the royal administration of pictures, and the painting competition of 1727.
December 1, 1996... Given the imprecision of some of these ancien regime institutions, they were often only worth the worth of their incumbents, who fashioned them to their characters and drew from them absolutely unexpected consequences. - Roger Guillemet, Essai...

Resurrecting death: anatomical art in the cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch.
December 1, 1996... The theatrical display of new science and empirical investigation as "strange and miraculous" was characteristic of early modern European scientific discourse.(1) In professional forums ranging from public demonstrations of anatomy to the...

Law and order in Ruben's 'Wolf and Fox Hunt.'
December 1, 1996... In 1986, Arnout Balis published the first comprehensive account of Rubens's hunting pictures in the Corpus Rubenianum series, laying the foundation for all future studies of the subject. With regard to A Wolf and Fox Hunt in New York...

Tintoretto's paintings for the 'Banco del Sacramento' in S. Margherita. (painter Jacopo Tintoretto)
December 1, 1996... Jacopo Tintoretto designed three paintings for the Venetian parish church of S. Margherita, a large Last Supper (137 1/2 x 208 1/2 in. [3.49 x 5.30 m]) and two smaller works of unequal size, Christ Washing the Apostles' Feet (131 x 90 3/4 in....

Die Erfindung des Gemaldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlandischen Malerei.
December 1, 1996... Before the Second World War, through Max J. Friedlander and Friedrich Winkler, the study of 15th-century Netherlandish painting was wholly dominated by scholars writing in German. The Nazi takeover, and the forced exile to America of a crucial...

Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550-1660.
December 1, 1996... The recent special issue of English Literary Renaissance entitled "The State of Renaissance Studies" provides a point of departure: the two essay collections under review offer a similar opportunity to assess new directions in Renaissance art...

Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650.
December 1, 1996... The recent special issue of English Literary Renaissance entitled "The State of Renaissance Studies" provides a point of departure: the two essay collections under review offer a similar opportunity to assess new directions in Renaissance art...

Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730-1930.
December 1, 1996... "Egyptomania" is the term that, for better or worse, has come to define the recurring fascination with ancient Egypt in Western European art and culture. The origin of the term, with its intimations of the irrational and popular dimensions of...

Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.
December 1, 1996... If the structuralist art history of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss has brought a theoretical sophistication to Greenbergian formalism, it has done so at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in need of fortification. For since...

The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism.
December 1, 1996... If the structuralist art history of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss has brought a theoretical sophistication to Greenbergian formalism, it has done so at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in need of fortification. For since...

Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars.
December 1, 1996... If the structuralist art history of Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss has brought a theoretical sophistication to Greenbergian formalism, it has done so at a time when that critical tradition is desperately in need of fortification. For since...