Exhibition | Dionysos Unmasked: Ancient Sculpture and Early Prints
Now on view at AIC:
Dionysos Unmasked: Ancient Sculpture and Early Prints
Art Institute of Chicago, 31 July 2015 — 15 February 2016
Hellenistic or Roman, Eastern Mediterranean. Statue of Young Dionysos, 100 BC–AD 100, bronze, copper and silver (modern). 136 x 62 x 52 cm (54 x 24 1/2 x 20 in.). Anonymous loan, 1.2013. Photography by Richard Valencia.
This innovative collaboration between the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and the Department of Prints and Drawings examines Renaissance and Baroque printmakers’ direct responses to Classical antiquity through the figure of Dionysos, the ancient Greek god of wine and theater. Installed in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, this exhibition juxtaposes ancient sculpture with prints from the 15th through the 18th century with nearly 100 objects—pieces from the permanent collection, new loans of ancient art, and recently acquired works on paper.
Dionysos—known as Bacchus to the Romans—cavorted with an entourage of satyrs, the god Pan, and frenzied maenads, female followers of the god. All these devotees represented the untamed and hedonistic desires of humanity, which were unleashed by the intoxicating elixir of wine. Because performance was a part of the early Greek festivals of Dionysus, he also became known as the patron god of theater, an aspect of the deity that is less well known today. In ancient art, Dionysos could take many forms, from a graceful youth to a bearded mature man. During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the time of early printmaking, interest in antiquity—especially Dionysos—flourished. Ancient sculptures depicting the god and his raucous retinue inspired artists to find new ways to transform age-old Dionysian subjects into prints and drawings that would appeal to their own contemporary audiences.
Left: Statue of a Young Satyr Wearing a Theater Mask of Silenos, ca. 1st century AD, restorations by Alessandro Algardi, 1628. Anonymous loan. Right: John Downman, Antique Statue of Seated Putto Holding Mask of Pan, 1775 (AIC, Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collections).
Anchoring the exhibition are Greek and Roman sculptures depicting Dionysos and his wild followers along with vessels used in ritual drinking parties and festivals honoring the god of wine and theater. Their printed counterparts are masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance to the French Rococo, including notably Andrea Mantegna’s Bacchanal with a Wine Vat, a 15th-century Italian engraving with striking visual similarity to the bronze Statue of Young Dionysos (a current long-term loan to the museum). Bringing together this rich selection of works, separated by as many as 1,500 years, this exhibition offers new, enticing insights into the art of Classical antiquity and its later revivals.
The June 2013 press release announcing the long-term loan of the bronze Statue of Young Dionysos is available as a PDF
file here»
New Book | Indian Cotton Textiles from the Karun Thkar Collection
From ACC Distribution:
John Guy, Indian Cotton Textiles: Chintz from the 14th to the Early 20th Centuries in Karun Thkar Collection (New York: ACC Art Books, 2015), 172 pages, ISBN: 978-1851498093, $70.
India has been at the heart of the global trade in textiles since ancient times, and cotton has been at the heart of the Subcontinent’s economy for millennia. Indian dyed and painted cottons were admired in and traded to the Far East and the Mediterranean world for many generations before European interest in chintz created a new market. The trade in Indian cloth flourished due to the ability of its craftsmen to create a multitude of detailed and expressive patterns with strong and fast colors. Such textiles gained high esteem among the elite at home and abroad, ultimately acquiring heirloom status.
Karun Thakar has been collecting textile art for more than 30 years, and has one of the world’s leading private collections from the Indian Subcontinent, with costume and fabrics from the 14th century through to the early 20th. Aspects of the Thakar Collection have been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Indian dyed and painted cotton cloths in the Thakar Collection are perhaps the best in private hands. Many have never previously been published. Dating from the 15th century onwards, the collection illustrates the trade in textiles across the Indian Ocean with the Malay-Indonesian world, with Sri Lanka, Armenia and Europe, as well as within the Indian domestic market.
John Guy is the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia, Department of Asia Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London. His major publications include: Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (1998), Indian Temple Sculpture (2007), Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900, and Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014).
2014 Dissertation Listings
From caa.reviews:
Dissertation Listings
PhD dissertation authors and titles in art history and visual studies from US and Canadian institutions are published each year in caa.reviews. Titles can be browsed by subject category or year.
Titles are submitted once a year by each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies. Submissions are not accepted from individuals, who should contact their department chair or secretary for more information. Department chairs: please consult our dissertation submission guidelines for instructions. The annual deadline is January 15 for titles from the preceding year.
In 2003, CAA revised the subject area categories of art history and visual studies used for all our listings, including dissertations. These categories are listed in the Dissertation Submission Guidelines.
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The index for 2014 lists eight eighteenth-century dissertations completed, including:
• Cannady, Lauren, “Owing to Nature and Art: The Garden Landscape and the Eighteenth-Century French Interior” (IFA/NYU, T. Crow)
• Fox, Abram, “The Great House of Benjamin West: Family, Workshop, and National Identity in Late Georgian England” (Maryland, College Park, W. Pressly)
• Francis, Razan, “Secrets of Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft Heritage” (MIT, D. Friedman)
• Marchand, Marie-Ève, “L’histoire de l’art mise en pièces. Analyse matérielle, spatiale et temporelle de la period room comme dispositif muséal” (Université de Montréal, J. Lamoureux)
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and forty-one dissertations in progress, including:
• Brosnan, Kelsey, “Seductive Surfaces: Anne Vallayer Coster and the Eighteenth-Century Still Life” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)
• Cooper, John, “Imperial Balls: The Arts of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1780–1870” (Yale, T. Barringer, R. Thompson)
• DiSalvo, Lauren, “Micromosaics as Grand Tour Souvenirs in Europe from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Late Nineteenth Century” (Missouri, M. Yonan, K. W. Slane)
• Gratta, Eva, “‘Great Links of the Chain’: Maritime Imagery in North America, 1750–1850” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)
• Greenberg, Daniel, “A New Imperial Landscape: Ritual, Representation, and Foreign Relations in the Qianlong Court (1735–1796)” (Yale, Y. Kim)
• Mitchell, David, “Mimetic Heresies: Waxworks in Paris, 1661–1723” (McGill, A. Vanhaelen; R. Taws)
• Presutti, Kelly, “Terroir after the Terror: Landscape and Representation in Nineteenth-Century France” (MIT, K. Smentek)
• Rado, Mei, “Xiyang Textiles in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Imperial Court: Fabrication, Display, and Representation of the West” (Bard Graduate Center, F. Louis)
• Ridlen, Michael T., “Prud’hon and the Graceful Style” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Szalay, Gabriella, “Materializing the Past: The History of Art and Natural History in Germany, 1750–1800” (Columbia, K. Moxey)
• Von Preussen, Brigid, “The Antique Made New: Commercial Classicism in Late Georgian Britain” (Columbia, A. Higonnet)
• Wunsch, Oliver, “Painting Against Time: The Decaying Image in the French Enlightenment” (Harvard, E. Lajer-Burcharth)
Call for Papers | Posing the Body
From The Courtauld:
Posing the Body: Stillness, Movement, and Representation
Regent Street Cinema, University of Westminster and The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 6–7 May 2016
Proposals due by 2 October 2015
Posing has been central to art, dance, and sculpture for thousands of years. In recent years, the growing interest in fashion media and modelling has also focused attention on questions of pose and posing. Incorporating notions of movement and stillness, posing can be understood in terms of historical modes of representation, as well as contemporary media and rapidly evolving relationships between bodies, subjects, and technologies of representation. Posing incorporates symbolic and semiotic meaning alongside embodied action and feeling. Recent coverage of the work of choreographer Stephen Galloway in 032c magazine, and new publications such as Steven Sebring’s Study of Pose: 1000 Poses by Coco Rocha testify to the growing interest in the cultural significance of posing and the pose—yet both remain under-researched areas with little discussion of their significance.
This symposium will assert the importance of pose as both a creative practice and an emerging area of critical inquiry. It will bring together multi-disciplinary academics and practitioners to discuss and develop new ways of understanding pose and posing in a historical and contemporary context. We encourage proposals for papers that address pose from global and diverse perspectives. This event represents a potentially fruitful and exciting moment to bring these strands together to the benefit of researchers within practice and theory-based media, historians of dress, photography, art and film and allied disciplines.
The keynote lecture will be delivered by David Campany, internationally recognised writer and curator, and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to)
• Modelling (fashion and artistic)
• Gesture
• Dance (popular and classical)
• Pose and the everyday
• Movement and stillness
• Posing, corporeality and the body
• Posing and social media (blogs, Instagram, etc.)
Please submit abstracts of 150–200 words in English, along with a short biography of approximately 100 words to Posingthebody@gmail.com by 2 October 2015.
Organised by Rebecca Arnold, Oak Foundation Lecturer in History of Dress & Textiles, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Katherine Faulkner, Study Skills and Widening Participation Academic Coordinator, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Katerina Pantelides, Visiting Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Eugénie Shinkle, Reader in Photography, University of Westminster.
New MA in the Art Market and History of Collecting
From The University of Buckingham and The National Gallery:
MA in the Art Market and History of Collecting
The University of Buckingham and the National Gallery, in association with Waddesdon Manor (The Rothschild Collection), are delighted to announce the launch of a new MA course on the History of Collecting and the Art Market in January 2016.
The study of the art market and the history of collecting has been one of the most significant growth areas within Art History in the last 30 years, attracting wide interest internationally, particularly in Europe and the United States. Competitively priced, this new MA will investigate American and European art markets and cultures of collecting from the Renaissance to the present day. The first of its kind in the UK, it will be taught by staff from the University of Buckingham, the National Gallery and Waddesdon Manor. The course will include study trips to Paris and Florence. All the London-based teaching, spread over two terms, will be based at the National Gallery in London.
A unique feature of the course will be access to two of the greatest surviving art dealers’ archives: Agnew’s, acquired by the National Gallery in 2014, and Colnaghi’s, housed in the Windmill Hill Archive, Waddesdon, since February 2014. Under the guidance of experts, students will be given practical training on how to use, unlock and analyse their rich holdings. Aimed at art historians, would-be curators, collectors, those with a professional interest in the art market or a general interest in the arts, the programme provides a pathway to a career in the art world or a step towards further postgraduate research.
University of Buckingham Programme Director, Jeremy Howard said: “I am thrilled by the exciting opportunities that our new MA will offer. Developed and delivered by the University of Buckingham and the National Gallery in association with Waddesdon, the MA will enable Buckingham to offer students privileged access to the two greatest London-based dealer archives, first-class research training, and an entrée to one of the fastest-growing areas of art history. For those with an eye on a PhD, a possible career in curatorship or the art market, the course will provide a valuable spring-board; but we are also hoping that this new MA will appeal to those who are interested in studying the history of collecting as a fascinating subject in its own right.”
Sir Nicholas Penny, Director of The National Gallery, said: “I am delighted that the National Gallery is collaborating with the University of Buckingham’s research-led MA focusing on the history of collecting and the art market. In an increasingly popular area of research, this course, designed and taught by leading figures in the field, will introduce students to the many and varied facets of the subject, as well as providing much-needed training in the use of archives, drawing on some of the National Gallery’s own important holdings, including the recently-acquired Agnew’s archive.”
Pippa Shirley, Head of Collections and Gardens at Waddesdon Manor said: “We are delighted to be working with the University of Buckingham and the National Gallery on this new MA, which explores a critical aspect of the nineteenth-century art market. There is a particular appropriateness for Waddesdon to be a part of this collaboration—not only is the Colnaghi Archive housed with us, but the collections at the Manor are a reflection of the passions of one of the most influential of nineteenth-century collecting dynasties, the Rothschilds, who bought through both Colnaghi and Agnew, which allows their archives to be brought to life in a very vivid way.”
Buckingham, set up in 1976, was the only university to be independent of direct government support in the United Kingdom and has used its independence to pioneer a distinctive approach to higher education.
The programme brochure is available as a PDF file here»
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