The Art Bulletin articles from September 2007

The Art Bulletin archives from September 2007

Interventions: the mediating work of art.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... To readers of this essay who are not specialists in Chinese art--the vast majority, I hope--the painting A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi) may be at least vaguely familiar (Fig. 1). This painting in ink and light...

Response: shifting biographies, shifting temporalities.(Chinese painting; art historian Jonathan Hay)
September 1, 2007... I want to argue for the nonexistence of Li Cheng. --Mi Fu (1052-1107), Huashi (1) A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi) in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, is one of the most familiar...

Response: "Picture Idea" and its cultural dynamics in Northern Song China.
September 1, 2007... Not all pictures are created equal. There is no guarantee that a painting necessarily has a "pictorial conception." Thus spoke the Chinese theorists in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), when such a notion became a discursive preoccupation....

Response: the mottled discourse of Chinese studies.
September 1, 2007... None of us, as art historians, is likely to have many original thoughts about how meaning works. We produce new interpretations, but few of us create new ideas about the process of doing so. Even as we dig to reveal new meanings in artworks, we...

Response: trapped: a Northern Song painting.(A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks)
September 1, 2007... Jonathan Hay's "The Mediating Work of Art" takes a famous but anonymous landscape painting of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi), as an example to chart a new direction in art...

Response: how is the past in the present?(art history; Chinese art)
September 1, 2007... I, of course, belong to Jonathan Hay's hoped-for vast majority of readers who are nonspecialists in Chinese art, and my response to his arguments will be shaped by those limitations, which must check comment at many points. I am also, however,...

Interventions: the author replies.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... James Elkins identifies mediation with the phenomenological account of embodied experience, associates my project with an undeclared embrace and exploration of a phenomenological tradition that art history more often takes for granted than...

The Inka married the earth: integrated outcrops and the making of place.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... According to a Quechua story told in the Andes today, the ancient Inka (Inca) of that area married Pachamama (Mother Earth) and produced human offspring. (1) A trace of that union is still manifest in the ruins of Inka buildings in the form of...

Visualizing appearance and disappearance: on Caravaggio's London Supper at Emmaus.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... In his first Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London), painted for Cardinal Ciriaco Mattei in 1601-2 (Fig. 1), Caravaggio deftly manipulated the conventional techniques of Renaissance narration to create an unheard-of kind of pictorial...

Naive impressions from nature: Millet's readings, from Montaigne to Charlotte Bronte.(Jean-Francois Millet; Michel de Montaigne)
September 1, 2007... Historians feel lucky when they know what a painter read, and how much luckier if they find artists who copied out passages from their readings! These signal what the painters considered particularly important and therefore give them guidance...

Orient oder Rom? Qajar "Aryan" architecture and Strzygowski's art history.(art historian Josef Strzygowski)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... Based on evidence gathered in his archaeological digs, the German Orientalist Ernest Herzfeld hypothesized that Achaemenid inscriptions had revealed that the name Iranian corresponded to the ancient term Aryanam Khshathram, the Empire of the...

Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600-800: A Poetics of Line.(Book review)
September 1, 2007... ADAM HERRING Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600-800: A Poetics of Line Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 332 pp.; 16 color ills., 120 b/w. $85.00 This is a challenging book that employs a unique vocabulary in...

Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Asthetische Illusion in der Kunst der fruhen Neuzeit in Italien.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... KLAUS KRUGER Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Asthetische Illusion in der Kunst der fruhen Neuzeit in Italien Munich: W. Fink, 2001. 446 pp.; 226 b/w ills. $88.00 [[euro]68] Words and images. This book embodies a paradox...

Making Up the Rococo: Francois Boucher and His Critics.(Rethinking Boucher)(books)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... MELISSA HYDE Making Up the Rococo: Francois Boucher and His Critics Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006. 272 pp.; 18 color and 53 b/w ills. $49.95 paper MELISSA HYDE AND MARK LEDBURY, EDS. Rethinking Boucher Los...

A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... JOHN RAEBURN A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 370 pp.; 24 b/w ills. $75.00 Among art historians, Beaumont Newhall's 1937 photography exhibition at the...

The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2007... BRIONY FER The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 222 pp.; 50 color ills., 83 b/w. $48.00 Sometime about 1960, a change took place in the form, status, function, and meaning of...

Books received (January-March 2007).
September 1, 2007... BAIGELL, MATTHEW. Jewish Art in America: An Introduction. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little-field, 2007. 280 pp.; 76b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0742546411) BATCHEN, GEOFFREY. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton...

Reviews online January-March 2007.(College Art Association)(List)
September 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...

Addendum: U.S. and Canadian Dissertations, 2006.(List)
September 1, 2007... The following dissertations were omitted from the June 2007 issue of The Art Bulletin (vol. LXXXIX, no. 2). Dissertations in Progress by Subject Art of the United States GLESMANN, AMANDA, "The Artistic House: Photographing Domestic...