Eike Schmidt Named Director of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum
As reported by The Art Newspaper (1 September 2017). . .
The director of the Uffizi galleries in Florence, Eike Schmidt, is stepping down to become head of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM). The German-born sculpture specialist will replace Sabine Haag in 2019, announced the Austrian culture minister, Thomas Drozda, at a press conference today (1 September).
Schmidt made waves when he was named the first non-Italian to lead the Uffizi in 2015, among 20 new ‘super directors’ appointed to modernise Italy’s top museums and heritage sites. Following curatorial posts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2001–06), the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2006–08), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2009–15), and a stint in charge of the European sculpture and works of art department at Sotheby’s London (2008–09), it was his first museum directorship. . .
The full article is available here»
New Book | Picturing India
From the University of Washington Press in conjunction with the British Library:
John McAleer, Picturing India: People, Places, and the World of the East India Company (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 224 pages, ISBN: 978 029574 2939, $40.
The British engagement with India was an intensely visual one. Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travelers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect the increasingly important role played by the Company in Indian life. And they mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes toward India. The Company’s story is one of wealth, power, and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed. Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj.
Few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and what they tell us about the link between images and empire, pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivalled riches of the British Library-both visual and textual-to tell that history. It weaves together the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and events they depict. And, in doing so, it presents a detailed picture of the Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.
John McAleer is lecturer in history at the University of Southampton. He was previously curator of imperial and maritime history at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is the author of Britain’s Maritime Empire: Southern Africa, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean 1763–1820.
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