The Art Bulletin articles from June 1997

The Art Bulletin archives from June 1997

The 'Nina,' the 'Pinta,' and the Internet. (ships in Christopher Columbus' expedition)(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... When I start a new class in art history and multimedia, I warn my students that they are signing on to the crew of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, and we are setting off on a voyage of discovery. We are not quite sure what adventures we...

What are we seeing, exactly?(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... Digital imagery is a seductive topic in cultural studies and visual theory. It is intimately tied to questions of surveillance, power, voyeurism, pornography, the demise of the text, the emergence of cybernetic bodies, and the construction of...

Making computers work for the history of art.(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... The idea of combining computers and the history of art may still be problematic but it is no longer shocking. Art historians now understand that databases, electronic bibliographies, storage and retrieval, and high-quality digitized images may be...

A view of the intersection of art and technology.(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... In 1988, as the most junior faculty member of my department who happened to be teaching "printmaking" or "graphics," I was asked to investigate computer "graphics." Fortunately, my forays into this new field were not only successful, but also...

Digital imagery and user-defined art.(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... "It's still the same picture, isn't it? What difference does it make if they change the label?" This is what we say when a museum demotes a painting from "Rembrandt" to "School of Rembrandt" or from "Caravaggio" to "Follower of Caravaggio."...

The policy landscape. (national and international policies on the arts)(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... Webraising is a term newly coined to refer to the construction of new sites on the World Wide Web (and the collective effort that the activity, like community barn raisings of old, entails).(1) It refers also to the consciousness-raising that...

Educating digiterati. (users of digitized art)(Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History)
June 1, 1997... We have finally sailed into the imaging age and, strangely, art history is not at the helm. Perhaps I am not alone in thinking that there is something deeply embarrassing in our having relinquished to communication schools and literary studies...

Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925. (painter John Singer Sargent)
June 1, 1997... John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is best known today as a painter of society portraits. In 1890, however, he embraced the opportunity to prove himself at mural decoration, a genre he and his contemporaries judged superior to portraiture.(1)...

Trompe l'oeil painting and the counterfeit Civil War.
June 1, 1997... A genuine old Gettysburg relic. If the canvas could hold a nail, we would say that the revolver itself was only hung on it. See the newspaper remarks attached to the painting. So claimed the text beneath the title of William Harnett's The...

Carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, artist: Copley and portrait painting around 1770. (John Singleton Copley)
June 1, 1997... A taste of painting is too much Wanting... was it not for preserving the resemble[n]ce of perticular persons, painting would not be known in the plac[e]. The people generally regard it no more than any other usefull trade, as they sometimes term...

Bernini's d'Aste family tombs in S. Maria in Via Lata, Rome: a reconstruction. (artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini)
June 1, 1997... In his landmark study Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, which appeared in 1980, Irving Lavin discussed the tombs of Giovanni Battista d'Aste and his wife Clarice Margana, which are installed in the apse of S. Maria in Via Lata. He...

A classical stage for the old nobility: the Strada Nuova and sixteenth-century Genoa. (residential palace street in Genoa, Italy)
June 1, 1997... Sixteenth-century Genoa produced a distinctively new type of urban space in the Strada Nuova (or, since 1882, the Via Garibaldi) - the residential palace street or linear piazza - designed to legitimize and enhance the authority of a ruling...

Kwesties van betekenis: Thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw.
June 1, 1997... Leiden, The Netherlands: Primavera Pers, 1995. 284 pp.; 264 b/w ills. Dfl 69,90 Nearly thirty years ago Eddy de Jongh wrote a bold article on the erotic content of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. "Erotica in vogelperspectief" (Erotica in...

Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine.
June 1, 1997... Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. 318 pp.; 8 color ills., 101 b/w. $60.50; $24.75 paper Nearly thirty years ago Eddy de Jongh wrote a bold article on the erotic content of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. "Erotica in...

Dutch Flower Painting: 1600-1720.
June 1, 1997... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 240 pp.; 34 color ills., 99 b/w. $45.00 Nearly thirty years ago Eddy de Jongh wrote a bold article on the erotic content of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. "Erotica in vogelperspectief" (Erotica in...

Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten.
June 1, 1997... Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 428 pp.; 16 color ills., 164 b/w. $75.00 Nearly thirty years ago Eddy de Jongh wrote a bold article on the erotic content of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. "Erotica in vogelperspectief" (Erotica...

Manet's Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s.
June 1, 1997... Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 647 pp.; 16 color ills., 200 b/w. $50.00 James Rubin's elegantly condensed, handsomely produced book argues that Manet, a Mallermean painter, makes his still-life bouquets stand for the process of...

Manet's Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets.
June 1, 1997... Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. 256 pp.; 12 color ills., 82 b/w. $39.95 James Rubin's elegantly condensed, handsomely produced book argues that Manet, a Mallermean painter, makes his still-life bouquets stand for the process...

'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.
June 1, 1997... exh. cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991. 424 pp.; 164 color ills., 646 b/w. $75.00; $34.95 paper On July 18, 1937, Adolf Hitler opened the House of German Art in Munich with the following words:...

'Entartete Kunst': Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland.
June 1, 1997... (Heidelberger Kunstgeschichtliche Abhandlungen, Neue Folge, XXI) Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995. 440 pp.; 17 color ills., 192 b/w. DM 180.00 On July 18, 1937, Adolf Hitler opened the House of German Art in Munich with the...