The Art Bulletin articles from December 2008

The Art Bulletin archives from December 2008

Interventions: decentering modernism: art history and avant-garde art from the periphery.(Report)
December 1, 2008... With the collapse of earlier certainties, the last two decades have witnessed serious soul-searching among art historians about the future of the discipline. This is strikingly expressed by Hans Belting in two of his theoretical works--one with...

Response: thoughts on difference in India and elsewhere.(Ruhi Arel's Stone Breakers and Indian modern art)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Imagine, for a moment, standing before Mehmet Ruhi Arel's 1924 Stone Breakers (Fig. 1). (1) Or, better, imagine a British art historian, partly traomed on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, standing in a museum in Istanbul, faced by a...

Response: provincializing modernity: from derivative to foundational.(Partha Mitter's Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Partha Mitter's "Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery" makes explicit a major shortfall within recent efforts to include the art of regions outside the broadly defined northern Atlantic. (1) Simply by...

Response: belonging to modernism.(art and history)(Report)
December 1, 2008... In the art history department in which I teach, there has been for some time now a collective concern about two categories that organize our curriculum. They are called, innocuously, Categories A and B, and they express a commitment to...

Response: modernism in India: a short history of a blush.(Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Partha Mitter's argument against the universalized canon of Western modernism reminds me of another Indian named Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan, who similarly railed against British imperialism in the nineteenth century. A British-educated judge in the...

Interventions: the author replies.(art history and modernism)(Report)
December 1, 2008... With "Decentering Modernism, " I hoped to provoke a debate on "modernism and its discontents," which is possibly one of the central art historical concerns of our day. In the process, I proposed a more critical and open-ended global art history...

The body of eve in Andrea Pisano's Creation relief.(The Creation of Eve)(Report)
December 1, 2008... Few themes are so fraught with social, moral, and political significance as the Creation. To this day, the Genesis stories of God creating man and woman are read, and misread, by the faithful as confirming the positions of their church about...

In form we trust: Neoplatonism, the gold standard, and the Machine Art show, 1934.(Report)
December 1, 2008... In the spring of 1934, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of New York's new Museum of Modern Art, saw one of his primary goals for the museum fulfilled: the incorporation of everyday objects of industrial design into the institution's...

The subversion of gravity in Jackson Pollock's abstractions.(Report)
December 1, 2008... While implementing the Surrealist directive of eliciting the unconscious, and intent on generating an extensive vocabulary of unbroken, free-flowing lines, Jackson Pollock felt his ambitions frustrated by two constraints endemic to conventional...

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.(Report)
December 1, 2008... Missus Kara E. Walker: Emancipated, and On Tour Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 17-May 13, 2007 Philippe Vergne and Sander L. Gilman et al., Kara Walker: MY...

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... ELIZABETH HILL BOONE Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. 338 pp.; 12 color ills., 144b/w. $55.00 Since the nineteenth century, scholars have studied the strikingly...

The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde.(The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... PARTHA MITTER The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 271 pp.; 100 color ills., 50 b/w. $45.00 Partha Mitter is the most established scholar of modern South Asian art...

Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... HILARY BALLON AND KENNETH T. JACKSON, EDS. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York New York: W.M. Norton, 2007. 304 pp.: 55 color ills., 200 b/w. $50.00 Cities are made and unmade in many ways. They may be...

Recent Books in the Arts; (April-June 2008).(Bibliography)
December 1, 2008... ADAMSON, GI. E N N. Thinking through Graft. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 224 pp.; 8 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (1845206479) AGRAVWL, KANU, MELANIE DOMINO, EDWARD RIGHARDSON, AND BRAD WALTERS, EDS. Perspecta 39:...

Reviews online; (April-June 2008).(caa.reviews)(Bibliography)
December 1, 2008... caa.reviews, published online by the College Art Association, is an online journal devoted to the peer review of new books, exhibitions, and projects relevant to the fields of art and art history. To access a review, type in the URL...