CAA 2016, Washington, D.C.
104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 3–6 February 2016
The 2016 College Art Association conference takes place in Washington, D.C., February 3–6, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008).
Speaking for no one but myself, I’m frankly perplexed at how thin the eighteenth-century offerings are, indeed how little there is on any period prior to 1850! In 2010, I could identify eleven sessions with connections to the eighteenth century. This year, I came up with only four (out of 200 sessions). My sense is that CAA is beginning to understand how dissatisfied affiliates are. In any event, the format of the conference will apparently be substantially different next year (note the session on Wednesday addressing the changes). Will the changes matter? We’ll see. The call for submissions will be posted March 1. Stay tuned.
And yet for all that seems to be missing from this year’s schedule, I want to highlight the HECAA and ASECS sessions, both of which look fabulous! And so on Friday, at least, from 12:30 to 5:00, CAA will be a terrific conference.* –CH
* Wearing my hat as president of the Historians of British Art, I can vouch for affiliate frustration there, too. And yet, as with the eighteenth-century offerings, there will be a handful of treats for scholars in British studies, too. And for whatever things, I’ve overlooked, please feel free to note these in the comments section.
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Looking Ahead: Changes to the CAA Conference
Wednesday, 3 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Wilson B, Mezzanine Level
Chair: Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University)
The CAA Annual Conference will undergo significant changes in future years, beginning with the 2017 conference. These changes will create more opportunities for participation. Among the changes:
a) The session grid will feature all 90-minute sessions.
b) The call for proposals will include not one but three main submission categories: sessions without panels, sessions with panels, and individual papers.
c) The call for submissions will be posted on March 1, 2016.
If you have questions about these important changes, please attend this session.
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Neatline for the Art Historian
Thursday, 4 February 2016, 2:30—4:30, Roosevelt 2, Exhibit Hall A, Exhibition Level
Lisa Reilly (University of Virginia) and Ronda Grizzle (Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library). Limit: 25 Participants. $45 for members and $60 for non-members.
Using Neatline, anyone can create beautiful, interactive maps, timelines, and narrative sequences from collections of objects, architectural models, archives and artifacts, which tell scholarly stories in a whole new way. Neatline is a remarkable digital presentation tool that allows art and architectural historians to show change over time. Art historians can use it to create visual presentations which reveal building sequences, mapping of artistic influences and patterns of historic change. Join us for this hands-on introduction to Neatline which will also discuss applications for our discipline. This will be a hands-on workshop; attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops to participate.
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The Mystery of Masonry Brought to Light:
Freemasonry and Art from the Eighteenth Century until Now
Friday, 5 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Delaware Suite A, Lobby Level
Chair: Reva J. Wolf (State University of New York at New Paltz)
• David V. Bjelajac (George Washington University), Peter Pelham, Freemasonry and the Alchemical Cunning of John Singleton Copley
• Alisa L. Luxenberg (University of Georgia), Building Codes: New Light on F.*. Baron Taylor and Les Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France
• Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis), Reveil de l’Iran: Freemasonry and Artistic Revivalism from Parsi Bombay to Qajar Tehran
• William D. Moore (Boston University), ‘To Consummate the Plan’: Solomon’s Temple in American Masonic Art, Architecture, and Popular Culture, 1865–1930
• David Martín López (University of Granada), What If Pombal, Goya and Lorca Were Freemasons? New Perspectives on the Masonic and Philo-masonic Presence in Portugal and Spain
Discussant: Aimee E. Newell (Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library)
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Eros and Enlightenment (ASECS Session)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Washington 2, Exhibition Level
Chairs: Nina Dubin (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Hérica Valladares (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
• Susanna Caviglia (University of Chicago), Painting of Love as Ideology of Harmony
• Paul Holmquist (Carleton University), Centralizing Love: Eros and Politics in the Oikéma of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
• Camille Mathieu (University of Oxford and St. John’s College), Eros amongst Eagles: Iconographies of Alliance in Napoleonic France
Discussant: Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina)
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Pastel: The Moment of a Medium in the Eighteenth Century (HECAA)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 2:30—5:00, Washington 6, Exhibition Level
Chairs: Iris J. Moon (Pratt Institute) and Esther Bell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
• Rochelle N. Ziskin (University of Missouri Kansas City), Pastel (and Other) Portraits Chez Mme Doublet
• Marjorie Shelley (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Painting in Crayons: Pastel as an Artists’ Medium in the Cultural and Commercial Context of the Eighteenth Century
• Oliver Wunsch (Harvard University), Face Time: Permanence and Pastel Portraiture
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Taking Stock: Early Modern Art Now
Saturday, 6 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Salon 1, Lobby Level
Chairs: Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford) and Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine
• Susan Dackerman (Getty Research Institute), The Paleontology of Print
• Itay Sapir (Université du Québec à Montréal), Patterns of Attention: Early Modern Art and the Potential Deceleration of Looking
• Claudia Swan (Northwestern University), Global Encounters Then and Now
• Marika T. Knowles (Harvard Society of Fellows), The Subject of History in the ‘Figures de différents caractères’ after Watteau
• Shira Brisman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hugo van der Goes and the Slip of Sin
New Book | Picture Titles
From Princeton UP:
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 352 pages, ISBN: 9780691165271, $35 / £25.
A picture’s title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn’t always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers—not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David’s Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns. Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English and director of The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Her books include Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton).
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Prologue (This is not a title)
I Naming and Circulating: Middlemen
1 Before Titles
2 Dealers and Notaries
3 Early Cataloguers
4 Academies
5 Printmakers
6 Curators, Critics, Friends—and More Dealers
II Reading and Interpreting: Viewers
7 Reading by the Title
8 The Power of a Name
9 Many Can Read Print
10 Reading against the Title
III Authoring as well as Painting: Artists
11 The Force of David’s Oath
12 Turner’s Poetic Fallacies
13 Courbet’s Studio as Manifesto
14 Whistler’s Symphonies and Other Instructive Arrangements
15 Magritte and The Use of Words
16 Johns’s No and the Painted Word
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Exhibition | Reynolds at Plymouth
Now on view in Plymouth:
The Influence of Italy
Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 24 October 2015 — 27 August 2016
Taking as its focus our newly-acquired sketchbook, which was completed by Sir Joshua Reynolds between 1750 and 1752, this display investigates what attracted the young artist to Italy and the lasting influence his tour had on his life and art. Scroll through a digital version of our sketchbook and see what caught Reynolds’s eye as he sketched his way across Rome. Discover why Italy’s art, history and landscape has had such an enduring influence on centuries of artistic imagination. Featuring works by Wilson, Guardi and Northcote, plus supporting loans from the De Pass Collection at the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, join us for a journey to la bella Italia.
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Now on view in Plymouth:
In the Frame: Plymouth’s Portraits Revealed
Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 13 December 2014 — 27 August 2016
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self-Portrait, ca. 1746 (Plymouth City Council)
Come and see an exhibition that delves more deeply into Plymouth’s portrait collection and presents characters that are new or rarely seen as well as some more familiar faces. ‘In the Frame’ features one of our most recent acquisitions—an early self-portrait by Plympton-born 18th-century artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds. This is set amongst other paintings of artists including self-portraits by James Northcote and Edward Opie.
You can come face to face with some of Plymouth’s maritime greats, too—from Hawkins and Raleigh to 18th-century admirals and George Gibbon, the Lieutenant Governor of Plymouth in the early 1700s, painted by Thomas Hudson. Important local faces and families also feature—from the Edgcumbes and the Eliots, to William Cookworthy (the founder of the Plymouth Porcelain factory) and the last town crier of Devonport.
Find out more about the research and the development that took place for this exhibition on our Museum blog.
Enfilade 
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