The Art Bulletin articles from March 1996

The Art Bulletin archives from March 1996

Signs in painting. (art theory)(Art History And Its Theories)
March 1, 1996... Since I am not an art historian in the sense of belonging to that profession through specific training and institutional affiliation, it is not easy for me to address the question of the impact of theories on art history. But I am a...

Whose formalism? (art criticism)(Art History And Its Theories)
March 1, 1996... Having recently been called a "crypto-formalist," a "new kind of Greenberg, one with hindsight," and a "nihilistic formalist," I feel it my duty, at this juncture of our discipline, to address the issue of formalism - of its uses and...

The crisis of 'art history.'(Art History And Its Theories)
March 1, 1996... Theory in My Time When I entered graduate school in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York in the early 1950s, theory was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, for me and for many of my cohorts, theory was a rather...

Theory, ideology, politics: art history and its myths.(Art History And Its Theories)
March 1, 1996... To reread as a woman is at least to imagine the lady's place; to imagine when reading the place of a woman's body; to read reminded that her identity is also remembered [sic] in stories of the body. - Nancy K. Miller(1) Re-vision - the act...

Theories of reference. (art history)(Art History And Its Theories)
March 1, 1996... What we have mostly come to mean by "theory" is an attitude of ironic doubt toward any truth claims made by a language or a representational system. This skepticism has been learned, in part, from aesthetic texts. Aesthetic texts are unusually...

Chevreul and Impressionism: a reappraisal.
March 1, 1996... They [the Impressionists] do not imitate; they translate, they interpret. They set out to extract the result of the multiple lines and colors that the eye perceives at a glance before an aspect of nature. - Emile Blemont, Le Rappel, April 9,...

Picturing 'a city for a single summer': paintings of the World's Columbian Exposition.
March 1, 1996... Relatively few nineteenth-century American paintings picture and interpret urban space. The contemporary functions of art, the working methods of artists, the mechanisms of patronage, and a general anxiety concerning the meaning and character...

'Art conceal'd': Peale's double portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming.
March 1, 1996... Charles Willson Peale's Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED! has long been regarded as one of the artist's finest images.(1) The double portrait of a Maryland merchant and his wife has frequently been...

Portrait of a collector as an agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and connoisseurship.
March 1, 1996... We are all condamnes . . .: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve . . .: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest,...

Copied carts: Spanish prints and colonial Peruvian paintings.
March 1, 1996... The influence of European prints and paintings on the art of colonial Spanish America is well documented. In contracts recording the commissioning of paintings in Cuzco, a center of art production in the Peruvian highlands, for example,...

Social status and art collecting: the collections of Shen Zhou and Wang Zhen.
March 1, 1996... Unusual circumstances make it possible to compare two fifteenth-century Chinese collections of paintings, one belonging to Shen Zhou (1427-1509), a wealthy landowner of Suzhou renowned as a painter, poet, and calligrapher, and the other to Wang...

The thermo-mineral complex at Baiae and De Balneis Puteolanis.
March 1, 1996... In the entire corpus of Roman architecture few sites present so richly articulated yet so problematic an outlook as Baiae (Baia) and its environs. Located northwest of the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius, Baiae was the center of the most extensive,...

Narrative and Event in Ancient Art.
March 1, 1996... This collection of articles grew out of a CAA session held in 1988, although the focus has been broadened from Greece and Rome to include the Ancient Near East. With one (partial) exception the contributions take their starting point from...

The Cathedral: The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Construction.
March 1, 1996... Following Constantine the Great's elevation of Christianity to privileged status in 313 and for more than a millennium thereafter, ecclesiastical architecture became the dominant art form throughout Europe, and the cathedral served as the...

The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome.
March 1, 1996... The Roman basilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano is one of the oldest, largest, and most opulently decorated churches in Christendom. Its relics - the heads of Saints Peter and Paul, the Table of the Last Supper, and the Ark of the Covenant - are...

A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War.
March 1, 1996... Yule Heibel's remarkable reflections on German painting and culture after the Second World War, Reconstructing the Subject, poses the fundamental problem of artistic expression in the aftermath of profound trauma. She asks: "who has the right...

Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany.
March 1, 1996... Yule Heibel's remarkable reflections on German painting and culture after the Second World War, Reconstructing the Subject, poses the fundamental problem of artistic expression in the aftermath of profound trauma. She asks: "who has the right...

Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950.
March 1, 1996... Yule Heibel's remarkable reflections on German painting and culture after the Second World War, Reconstructing the Subject, poses the fundamental problem of artistic expression in the aftermath of profound trauma. She asks: "who has the right...

As Befits a Legend: Building a Tomb for Napoleon, 1840-1861.
March 1, 1996... In an article in the Times Literary Supplement several years ago, Umberto Eco quoted a 17th-century tale by way of arguing the case for textual "rights." The story had appeared in John Wilkins's Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger...

Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and The French Left, 1830-1850.
March 1, 1996... In an article in the Times Literary Supplement several years ago, Umberto Eco quoted a 17th-century tale by way of arguing the case for textual "rights." The story had appeared in John Wilkins's Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger...

Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution.
March 1, 1996... In an article in the Times Literary Supplement several years ago, Umberto Eco quoted a 17th-century tale by way of arguing the case for textual "rights." The story had appeared in John Wilkins's Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger...