The Art Bulletin articles from March 2006

The Art Bulletin archives from March 2006

Interventions: the boy in bed: the scene of reading in N. C. Wyeth's Wreck of the "Covenant".
March 1, 2006... What does the emanating and bittersweet power of imagination look like in American painting in the years right after 1900? What became of that romantic conceit in the new century, some one hundred years after its heyday? And what does this...

Response: romancing the modern: Nemerov, Wyeth, and the limits of American art history.(Alexander Nemerov's "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N.C. Wyeth's Wreck of the 'Covenant'")
March 1, 2006... Though hardly announcing itself as such, Alexander Nemerov's "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N.C. Wyeth's Wreck of the 'Covenant'" might stand as a kind of description of the state of the field of the history of art in the United...

Response: seeing and reading N. C. Wyeth and Robert Louis Stevenson.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, first published in 1886, tells the story of the young and newly orphaned David Balfour, who, the rightful heir to the House of Shaws, falls victim to his miserly uncle's treachery and finds himself an...

Response: on subliminal iconography.(Alexander Nemerov's essays)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... For well over a decade now, Alexander Nemerov has been taking very seriously the work of artists that more traditional historians of American art relegated to the margins of their histories or simply ignored. For Nemerov, artist-illustrators...

Response: on feminine phantoms: mother, child, and woman-child.(Alex Nemerov's essay "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth's Wreck of the 'Covenant,'" )
March 1, 2006... As Alex Nemerov observes in his essay "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth's Wreck of the 'Covenant,'" the figure of the child surely personified the life of the imagination in American culture at the beginning of the twentieth...

The author replies.(paintings)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest,...

Visual formula and meaning in Neo-Assyrian relief sculpture.
March 1, 2006... Palace reliefs of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (883-612 BCE) have a long-acknowledged content of a "historical" or "historicizing" character, especially visible in many scenes of battles and sieges. They are, however, also characterized by a...

The natural history of man and the politics of medical portraiture in Manchester.
March 1, 2006... In the second half of the eighteenth century, medical portraiture flourished in proportion to the growing public assaults on the medical profession. Amid a torrent of negative representations by satirists and caricaturists, medical portraiture...

Photography by other means? The engravings of Ferdinand Gaillard.
March 1, 2006... [Gaillard's] ideal would seem to have been a sort of hand-made daguerreotype....--William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 1953 (1) It is the summer of 1863. The Parisian public has recently witnessed an...

On the limits of empathy.
March 1, 2006... After a century of benign neglect and denigration, empathy has been rearing its comforting head in Anglophone cultural discourse. Seemingly a kinder, gentler model of the aesthetic response--compared with stringent abstraction, dizzying...

Freud's Moses of Michelangelo: Vasari, photography, and art historical practice.(Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Vasari)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... Michelangelo's Moses (Fig. 1) has had a long life in art historical study: carved about 1515 for the tomb of Pope Julius II, it had been visible in S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome--and in various forms of representation--for almost four hundred...

Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483-1602.(Book review)
March 1, 2006... JOHN SHEARMAN Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483-1602) New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 2 vols., 1718 pp. 32 b/w ills. $125.00 This review is an outsider's short notice of a work that demands and will be getting its...

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism.(Book review)
March 1, 2006... MICHAEL BAXANDALL Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 169 pp.; 25 color ills. $35. Four of the seven papers that make up Michael Baxandall's latest book have...

The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII's Tower of the Winds in the Vatican.(Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... NICOLA COURTRIGHT The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII's Tower of the Winds in the Vatican Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312 pp.; 10 color ills., 214 b/w. $90.00 TRACY L. EHRLICH...

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.(Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings )(Book review)
March 1, 2006... ILONA KATZEW Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 256 pp.; 127 color ills., 143 b/w. $60.00 MAGALI M. CARRERA Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and...

Rembrandt: Portraits in Print.(Book review)
March 1, 2006... STEPHANIE S. DICKEY Rembrandt: Portraits in Print Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. 366 pp.; 178 b/w ills. $216.00 In her admirable study of Rembrandt's portrait etchings, Stephanie Dickey uses a narrow lens through which to examine...

Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe.(Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... FREDERICK N. BOHRER Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 383 pp.; 79 b/w ills. $95.00 DOUGLAS R. NICKEL Francis Frith in Egypt and...

Prosthetic Gods.(Book review)
March 1, 2006... HAL FOSTER Prosthetic Gods Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. 455 pp.; 15 color ills., 121 b/w. $35.00 Hal Foster has long pursued what might be called the psychohistorical analysis of twentieth-century art. Prosthetic Gods is...

Books received (August-September 2005).
March 1, 2006... ALEXANDER, DARSIE. SlideShow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art. With essays by Charles Harrison and Robert Storr. Exh. cat. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2005. 224 pp.; 202 color ills. Cloth $29.95 (0271025417) ALLEN, JAMES P....

Reviews online September-October 2005.(College Art Association)(Bibliography)
March 1, 2006... caa.reviews, published 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...