The Art Bulletin articles from June 1998

The Art Bulletin archives from June 1998

Medieval Death.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. 224 pp.; 11 color ills., 89 b/w. $39.95 The universal phenomenon of death would seem to have no history, but we have learned better. Since the 1919 publication of Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the...

Master of Death.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 296 pp.; 45 color ills., 145 b/w. $40.00 The universal phenomenon of death would seem to have no history, but we have learned better. Since the 1919 publication of Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the...

Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Trans. Gaston du C. de Vere; Intro. and notes, David Ekserdjian New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 2 vols. 2,114 pp., $60.00 Published in the middle years of the 16th century and thus almost 500 years old, Vasari's monumental Lives of the...

Giorgio Vasari: Art and History.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 448 pp.; 11 color ills., 153 b/w. $45.00 Published in the middle years of the 16th century and thus almost 500 years old, Vasari's monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects is...

Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 176 pp.; 239 b/w ills. $75.50 Published in the middle years of the 16th century and thus almost 500 years old, Vasari's monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects is without...

Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 400 pp.; 35 b/w illus. $39.50 For most of the past two centuries, much of Germany's culture - its literature, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture - has been profoundly influenced by a...

The Paintings of Paul Cezanne: A Catalogue Raisonne.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Vol. 1, The Texts: 592 pp.; 58 color ills., numerous b/w. Vol. 2, The Plates: 335 pp.; 955 b/w ills. $400.00 To establish the corpus and chronology for Paul Cezanne's art: this daunting task dominated John...

George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 258 pp.; 64 b/w ills. $39.50 When Oskar Kokoschka issued an appeal calling for a cease-fire after Rubens's Bathsheba, housed in Dresden's Zwinger Gallery, was damaged by exchanges of gunfire...

Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917-1933.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New York: Da Capo Press, 1996; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 272 pp.; 212 b/w ills. $17.95 paper When Oskar Kokoschka issued an appeal calling for a cease-fire after Rubens's Bathsheba, housed in Dresden's Zwinger Gallery, was damaged by...

African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 486 pp.; 8 color ills., 161 b/w. $50.00 With a few exceptions, Africanist art histories have not taken us simultaneously (and to a sufficient depth) into the historical, productional, semantic,...

The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender.(Review)
June 1, 1998... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 352 pp.; 60 b/w ills. $95.00 With a few exceptions, Africanist art histories have not taken us simultaneously (and to a sufficient depth) into the historical, productional, semantic, and...

Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 280 pp.; 112 b/w ills. $45.00 With a few exceptions, Africanist art histories have not taken us simultaneously (and to a sufficient depth) into the historical, productional, semantic, and circulatory...

In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters.(Review)
June 1, 1998... New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 335 pp.; 48 b/w ills. $39.95; $18.95 paper Richard Etlin's new book engages the most important issues currently debated in the humanities regarding meaning and value in the arts. His study might...

Gesture and alterity in the art of Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria.
June 1, 1998... Long considered the hallmark of the art of the Assyrian Empire, the massive stone relief sculptures that decorated the interiors of ancient Assyrian palaces in northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) appear to have been introduced to Assyria during...

Notre-Dame of Paris and the anticipation of Gothic.
June 1, 1998... In his Entretiens sur l'architecture Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc presented four schematic plans that, seen in sequence, project a dynamic theory of medieval architecture [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(1) In the first plan two parallel...

The pain of Compassio: Mary's labor at the foot of the cross.
June 1, 1998... In 1983 Leo Steinberg "rescued from modern oblivion" the theological significance of Renaissance images showing the genitals of Christ.(1) Whether or not one agrees with all of Steinberg's interpretations,(2) it is undeniable that modern...

Barren metal and the fruitful womb: the program of Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua.
June 1, 1998... Unde fit quidam partus cum denarius ex denario crescit. (Thus, a kind of birth takes place when money grows from [other] money.) - Thomas Aquinas, In VIII libros Politicorum expositio(1) Quod concepisti parturies. (What you have conceived,...

We see a ghost: Hogarth's satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs.
June 1, 1998... I have seen Hogarth's print of the Ghost. It is a horrid composition of lewd Obscenity & blasphemous prophaneness for which I detest the artist & and have lost all esteem for the man. The best is, that the worst parts of it have a good chance...

Nudity a la grecque in 1799.
June 1, 1998... Wake up the women at the right of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male warriors [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Now remove the men's clothes. This is the startling, even preposterous, double...

Inventing Assyria: exoticism and reception in nineteenth-century England and France.
June 1, 1998... Since the Elgin marbles were brought to England, no similar arrival has occurred so calculated to excite the interests of artists and archaeologists, as these Assyrian-Babylonian remains. . . . - Sidney Smirke, 1847(1) Among the...

National and colonial: the Musee des Colonies at the Colonial Exposition, Paris, 1931.
June 1, 1998... A city has just been born, attached to Paris. In the groves of the Ile-de-France, the sun germinates surprising flowerings of stone, wood temples, beaten earth, strange sculptures, roofs like curved prows, bellturrets with bulbs and creepers.....