Enfilade

Here’s the description for the HECAA-sponsored, 90-minute session—chaired by Andria Derstine and Rena Hoisington—on the legacy of Donald Posner:

103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 9 May 2014

The 2015 Call for Participation for the 103rd Annual Conference, taking place February 11–14 in New York, describes many of next year’s sessions. CAA and the session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Donald Posner and the Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Art
Andria Derstine, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; Rena M. Hoisington, Baltimore Museum of Art, Andria.Derstine@oberlin.edu and RHoisington@artbma.org

Donald Posner (1931–2005), the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, was one of a select group of art historians who, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, significantly advanced scholarly inquiry into the Italian and French Baroque. From his first published article, on Le Brun’s Triumphs of Alexander series (1959), to his work on Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Callot, and Poussin, his work helped to initiate and direct future research in the field. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he began to turn his attention toward the eighteenth century—then a notably understudied area. His publications on Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Tiepolo, Rigaud, and Nattier set standards for art historical scholarship and greatly contributed to the burgeoning interest in this ‘new’ century. As wide-ranging as the topics he took up was his critical method, encompassing connoisseurship, patronage and collecting, iconography, stylistic issues, taste, and aesthetics, among others. Posner promoted and encouraged research and publication over the course of his long career, and served CAA as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin from 1968 to 1971 and as Chairman of The Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 1991 to 1994. Ten years after his death, this panel celebrates Posner’s rich legacy by inviting papers that take up particular areas of his field of inquiry and present new information, or that are stimulated by his scholarship and relate to his broad interests.

Descriptions for additional sessions are available here»