The Art Bulletin articles from March 2007

The Art Bulletin archives from March 2007

Interventions: The Melancholy Art.
March 1, 2007... Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.... The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning...

Response: epithalamium.(Helen Molesworth's "Duchamp: By Hand, Even" and Michael Ann Holly's "The Melancholic Art")
March 1, 2007... I've found myself returning repeatedly over the past several months to a simple phrase--"the marriage of two fully elaborated adults"--each time with both a sharper sense of the simple perfection of the phrase and a further sense, much harder...

Response: the dark side of art history.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... Covetous men, amongst others, are most mad; they have all the symptoms of melancholy--fear, sadness, suspicion, & c....--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1) The "art" in the title of Michael Ann Holly's essay "The...

Response: the far in the near.(April Gornik's Mirrored Trees)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... To be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore. --Roland Barthes, "Requichot et son corps" (1) Beholding April Gornik's Mirrored Trees, like writing about it, is to be beckoned into something akin to D. W. Winnicott's...

Response: reasons to be cheerful.
March 1, 2007... Melancholic knowledge is something like the prospective recognition of objects in the ruin of the system that represents them.--Jean-Louis Schefer, "Panadis perdu" (1) To be sure, "[l]anguage signifies... not the thing but the...

Interventions: the author replies.(intricacies of the art history genre)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... And these things That keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, They look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into--O endlessly--us!...

Self-promotion in Adelaide Labille-Guiard's 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Students.
March 1, 2007... When Adelaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) submitted her monumental Self-Portrait with Two Students to the 1785 Salon exhibition sponsored by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, she presented herself to a large and diverse Parisian...

Delecluze's response to Delacroix's Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824).
March 1, 2007... Eugene Delacroix's main entry to the Salon exhibition of 1824 was entitled Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc. (1) This work depicts the aftermath of an episode involving protracted bloodshed from...

Historicism and the symbolic imagination in Nazarene art.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... On October 10, 1840, the king of Bavaria, Ludwig I, left his palace and headed toward the newly erected church of St. Ludwig. Named after the king's patron saint, the building represented another stone in the grand-scale mosaic of his urban...

Ineffable paths: mapping Wutaishan in Qing dynasty China.(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2007... It was by a circuitous route that the map of Wutaishan ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Mountain of Five Terraces) returned to this sacred mountain range in northeastern China in 2005 (Fig. 1). The map was derived from a set of woodblocks...

The world in the ground glass: transformations in P. H. Emerson's photography.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... Nothing could be less controversial now than to assert that a break in theory and practice separates modernist from postmodernist photography. Abigail Solomon-Godeau offers a clear, concise, and canonical statement of the postmodernist critique...

Robert Rauschenberg and David Smith: compelling contiguities.
March 1, 2007... David Smith: A Centennial Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 3-May 14, 2006 Carmen Gimenez, David Smith: A Centennial, exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2006. 460 pp., 175 color ills., 125 b/w. $85 ...

Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... A. A. DONOHUE Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 278 pp.; 43 b/w ills. $80.00 Alice Donohue's new book examines the historiography of stylistic description and its role in...

St. Peter's in the Vatican.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... WILLIAM TRONZO, ED. St. Peter's in the Vatican Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 313 pp.; 338 b/w ills. $125.00 Throughout the years, the extraordinary history of St. Peter's continues to attract scholars from various...

The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... GULRU NECIPOGLU The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 592 pp.; 250 color ills., 300 b/w. $99.50 Until quite recently, Ottoman architecture fell between the...

Books received July-September 2006.
March 1, 2007... ACCONCI, VITO. The Early Writings of Vito Acconci. Ed. Craig Dworkin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. 411 pp. Cloth $34.95 (0262012243) ADAMS, HENRY, ED. Andrew Wyeth: Master Drawings from the Artist's Colleclion. Exh. cat. Chadds Ford,...

Reviews online August-October, 2006.
March 1, 2007... 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...