The Art Bulletin articles from March 2009

The Art Bulletin archives from March 2009

Correction.(Correction notice)
March 1, 2009... Correction: In the December 2008 issue of The Art Bulletin, vol. XC, no. 4, on p. 531 the artist Wifredo Lam was mistakenly referred to as Mexican. Lam's nationality is Cuban.

Interventions: Picasso's Closet.(Play)
March 1, 2009... Anything can happen. Everything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality, the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blending of memories, experiences, free inventions, ...

Response: suffering machine: Ariel Dorfman and Picasso.(Pablo Picasso)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... As a theatergoer, I would be entranced by the nightmare phantasmagoria of Picasso's Closet. As an art historian, however, I'm distressed by Ariel Dorfman's caricature of Picasso and troubled by what his play reveals about the place of art in...

Response: artists in times of war.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... The fact alone of bringing forth a beautiful work, in the full sovereignty of one's spirit, constitutes an act of revolt and denies all social fictions.... Whoever communicates to his brothers in suffering the secret splendor of...

Response: Ariel Dorfman's quest for responsibility.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... Ariel Dorfman's play Picasso's Closet presents itself as an (episode of an) artist's biography--"Picasso"--and promises to reveal secrets about him of a socially embarrassing nature--"closet." These secrets, as it turns out, are not sexual but...

Interventions: the author replies: our black-and-white catastrophe.(Essay)
March 1, 2009... Where does Picasso's Closet come from? Let me start there, with the origins, by exploring the obsessions, faraway and intimate, immediate and political, that compelled me to write the play, so the reader can be provided with a con-text for...

Middleman: Antoine Watteau and Les Charmes de la vie.(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... Les charmes de la vie, the portrayal of an intimate music party set on a majestic terrace, painted about 1717 (Fig. 1), is the sort of picture for which Antoine Watteau is best known: a fete galante, or depiction of an open-air social gathering...

The sultan's authority: Delacroix, painting, and politics at the Salon of 1845.(Eugene Delacroix)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... The Battle of Isly was for M. Delacroix a wholly natural occasion to show the crowd [one of] these great equestrian portraits, the sketch for which he had brought back long ago, at the time of his voyage in Morocco. Thus, the Battle...

Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... JAS ELSNER Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 367 pp.; 16 color ills., 88 b/w. $52.50 With its droll first page, which configures the book title as optician's chart,...

Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... STEPHEN F. TEISER Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 336 pp.; 14 color ills., 74 b/w. $60.00 Among the most arresting images in the Buddhist lexicon...

Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... HARVEY STAHL Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 387 pp.; 99 color ills., 79 b/w. $85.00 The Saint Louis Psalter (Paris,...

From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa Chicago.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... STEVEN NELSON From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 304 pp.; 8 color ills., 101 b/w. $50.00 Where one reads a book matters. Distance often makes for rich...

Reviews Online (July-September 2008).(List)
March 1, 2009... 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...