Call for Papers | MAHS in the Twin Cities, 2015
I’m glad to put in a good word for MAHS, an organization that far exceeds common expectations of a regional society. Particularly because of its commitments to bringing together scholars from both the museum world and the academy, the organization fills a vital need within the field of art history in America. Conference participants will be in for a treat with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ hosting the exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections during the event. The program will include general sessions on ‘Architecture’, ‘American Art’, ‘Latin American Art’, and ‘Nordic Art’; thematic sessions addressing ‘Midwest Collections’, ‘Representing Non-European Religions in Early Modern Europe’, ‘Clothing, Textiles, and Fiber’, ‘Decorative Arts and Design’, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, and ‘Prints and Drawings’; along with period panels on ‘Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art’ and ‘Nineteenth-Century Art’. See the newsletter for a full listing. –CH
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Midwest Art History Society Conference
Minneapolis and St. Paul, 26–28 March 2015
Proposals due by 15 December 2014
The University of St. Thomas Department of Art History is pleased to announce that we are co-hosting the 42nd annual Midwest Art History Society Conference with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with additional support from the Weisman Art Museum and the Thrivent Financial Collection of Religious Art. The conference will be held in the Twin Cities, March 26–28, 2015. Please consider submitting a proposal to present at the conference. There are a variety of thematic sessions planned, along with open sessions in many fields of the discipline, as well as a panel set aside for research by undergraduates. More information about the event, including descriptions of the sessions and instructions for application, is available in the MAHS newsletter.
Call for Articles | ‘The Architectural Review’ Seeks Submissions
From H-ArtHist:
Does your research into architectural history deserve a wider public? The Architectural Review seeks contributors for its new History section, a 1,200-word feature which aims to bring the unexamined to light and open new perspectives on more familiar questions. Any subject relating to architecture or urbanism will be considered, whether it concerns a practice, person, building, exhibition, event, or a wider theme. However, international topics having current relevance for an audience of architects, historians, and non-specialists alike are particularly welcome. The tone should be witty and engaging, but also informed and authoritative.
Forthcoming examples include essays on British architecture on the eve of the First World War, queer Gothic space, Walter Gropius’s Playboy Club in London, and a postwar estate of Scandinavian-style houses for the intelligentsia in Warsaw.
Abstracts of 200 words maximum, plus a short biography, should be sent to the magazine’s History Editor, Tom Wilkinson, tom.wilkinson@emap.com.
Call for Papers | Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World
From the project website:
Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800
St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, 9–11 July 2015
Proposals due by 7 January 2014
Across faiths and regions and throughout the world, the home was a centre for devotion in the early modern period. Holy books, prayer mats, candlesticks, inscriptions, icons, altars, figurines of saints and deities, paintings, prints and textiles all wove religion into the very fabric of the home. While research into religious practice during this period often focuses on institutions and public ceremonies, it is clear that the home played a profound role in shaping devotional experience, as a place for religious instruction, private prayer and contemplation, communal worship, and the performance of everyday rituals.
The ERC-funded research project Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home will be hosting this three-day international interdisciplinary conference in July 2015. The project team invites proposals for 20-minute papers that explore domestic devotions in the early modern world. Papers may consider this theme from a variety of perspectives, including material culture studies, art and architectural history, gender studies, theology, religious studies, economic and social history, literary studies, musicology, archaeology and anthropology. Topics may include, though are not limited to
• Religion, ritual and belief in the home
• The use of images, objects or books in private devotion
• Daily life and life cycles
• The relationships between collective (e.g. institutional or non-familial) devotion and private devotion
• The role of the senses in spiritual experience
• The production and ownership of religious objects found in the home
• Gender, race or age and devotional life
• Policing and regulating household religion
• Encounters between different faiths and traditions in domestic context
• Domestic devotional spaces
• Music in domestic devotion
• Devotional literature
Plenary speakers will be Debra Kaplan (Bar-Ilan University), Andrew Morrall (Bard Graduate Center) and Virginia Reinburg (Boston College).
Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to Maya Corry at mc878@cam.ac.uk, Marco Faini at mf531@cam.ac.uk, and Alessia Meneghin at am2253@cam.ac.uk by 7th January 2015. Along with your abstract please include your name, institution, paper title and a brief biography. Successful applicants will be notified by 7th February 2015.
The conference will take place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. College accommodation will be bookable nearer the time. Registration fees (tbc) will be kept as low as possible and graduate bursaries will be available to help with costs.
Lecture | Basile Baudez on Saint Petersburg’s Panorama
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From Penn’s Humanities+Urbanism+Design Initiative:
Basile Baudez | ‘The Décor of an Opera Built Yesterday’, Saint Petersburg’s Panorama
Penn School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 20 November 2014
Founded in 1703 on the Neva River Delta to provide Russia with a port to serve its Baltic ambitions, Saint Petersburg was aggressive in its bid to be read as a modern, European capital. The first prints representing the city adopted a panoramic format that focused on the Neva, its sublime width, and the magnificent new façades erected along its shores. Visitors understood the river landscape, however, as an insurmountable obstacle to proper urban development. For them, the Neva conveyed the hostility of nature, while the buildings—forever to be seen from too great a distance—appeared unreal, ready to vanish into the flat horizon.
Basile Baudez is Assistant Professor at the University Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV).
Thursday, 20th November 2014, 6:15pm
Meyerson Hall, Lower Level, B3
210 S. 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA
Exhibition | Glitterati: Portraits & Jewelry from Colonial Latin America
From the DAM:
Glitterati: Portraits & Jewelry from Colonial Latin America
Denver Art Museum, 7 December 2014 — 27 November 2016
Young Woman with a Harpsichord (detail), Mexico, 1735–50 (Denver Art Museum).
During the Spanish Colonial period in Latin America (1521–1850), precious gold and silver were crafted into elegant jewelry then embellished with emeralds from Colombia, coral from Mexico, and pearls from Venezuela. Wanting to demonstrate their wealth and status, people were painted wearing their finest dress and elaborate jewelry.
Women were adorned with tiaras, necklaces with pendants, and prominent earrings. Men proudly displayed hat ornaments, rings, watch fobs, and chatelaines (decorative belt hooks) with small tools similar to the modern Swiss Army knife. Priests wore gold crucifixes and rosaries while nuns had miniature paintings of the Virgin Mary and saints crafted into brooches, called nun’s badges. Inlaid and lacquered chests and boxes were used to store these luxury goods.
The portraits, furniture, and jewelry that are exhibited in Glitterati, drawn from the DAM’s world-renowned Spanish Colonial collection, tell the fascinating story of people and luxury possessions in the New World.
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From the conference page:
New England / New Spain: Portraiture in the Colonial Americas, 1492–1850
Denver Art Museum, 23–24 January 2015
The 14th Annual Mayer Center Symposium is organized by Dr. Donna Pierce, Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum, and Dr. Emily Ballew Neff, Saxon Director & Chief Curator, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma.
Portraiture was an important art form in the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) and in the British colonies of North America. Today, details in portraits—such as clothing, jewelry, and decorative arts—often reveal clues to the lives of both artists and sitters. At the symposium, scholars from both fields of study will present tandem talks addressing the evolution of portraiture as well as the similarities and differences in the colonial experience of the two regions.
S P E A K E R S
• Michael A. Brown (San Diego Museum of Art | San Diego) — Pieces of Home? How ‘Colonial’ Portraiture Developed in the Spanish and British Americas
• Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (The Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York) — The New England Portraits of Ralph Earl: Fashioning a Style for the New Citizens of the Young Republic
• Clare Kunny (Director, Art Muse | Los Angeles) — In His Own Image: A Humanist Portrait of Antonio de Mendoza
• Karl Kusserow (Princeton University Art Museum | Princeton) — Pride of Place: Selfhood and Surroundings in Early American Art
• James Middleton (Independent Scholar | New York) — Reading Dress in New Spanish Portraiture
• Paula Mues Orts (National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography | Mexico City) — Corporate Portrait in New Spain: Social Bodies, the Individual, and their Spaces of Display
• Susan Rather (University of Texas | Austin) — Copies or Resemblances of Nature: The Limitations of Portrait Painting in Colonial British America
• Michael J. Schreffler (Virginia Commonwealth University | Richmond) — Cortes and Moctezuma: Words, Pictures, and Likeness in Sixteenth-Century New Spain
• Jennifer Van Horn (George Mason University | Fairfax) — Regional Tastes in a Transatlantic Market: Joseph Blackburn in New England and Bermuda
• Kaylin Haverstock Weber (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Houston) — Colonial Ambition Abroad: Benjamin West’s Portraits, 1763–1783
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Note (added 1 February 2016) — The catalogue has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press:
Donna Pierce and Julie Wilson Frick, Companion to Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry from Colonial Latin America at the Denver Art Museum (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-0914738756, $15.
New Book | Owning the Past
Now available in the UK from the Paul Mellon Centre with US publication scheduled for January:
Ruth Guilding, Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840 (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 412 pages, ISBN: 978-0300208191, £55 / $85.
In a lively re-examination of the British collectors who bank- rupted themselves to possess antique marble statues, Owning the Past chronicles a story of pride, rivalry, snobbery, and myopic obsession with posterity and possession. Analyzing the motives that drove ‘Marble Mania’ in England from the 17th through the early 19th century, Ruth Guilding examines how the trend of collecting antique sculpture entrenches the ideals of connoisseurship and taste, exacerbates socioeconomic inequities, and serves nationalist propaganda. Even today, for the individuals or regimes that possess them, classical statuary performs as a symbol of authority or as the trophies of a ‘civilized’ power. From Adolf Hitler posing for the press beside an ancient copy of Myron’s Discobolus to the 2002 sale of the Newby Venus for a record price of about $13 million to the Emir of Qatar, marble mania remains unabated. With insider access to private collections, Guilding writes with verve and searing insight into
this absorbing fixation.
Ruth Guilding is an independent scholar and critic.
Call for Papers | Scientiae, Toronto 2015
From the conference website:
Scientiae, Toronto 2015
Victoria College, University of Toronto, 27–29 May 2015
Proposals due by 17 November 2014
Keynotes by Anthony Grafton (Princeton) & Peter Dear (Cornell)
Paper, panel, and round-table proposals are invited for the fourth annual international conference on the emergent knowledge practices of the early-modern period (1450–1750). The major premise of this conference is that knowledge during the period of the Scientific Revolution was inherently interdisciplinary, involving complex mixtures of practices and objects which had yet to be separated into their modern ‘scientific’ hierarchies. Our approach, therefore, needs to be equally wide-ranging, involving Biblical exegesis, art theory, logic, and literary humanism; as well as natural philosophy, alchemy, occult practices, and trade knowledge. Attention is also given to mapping intellectual geographies through the tools of the digital humanities. Always, our focus must be on the subject-matter at hand, rather than on the disciplinary performances by which we access it. Although centred around the emergence of modern natural science, Scientiae is intended for scholars working in any area of early-modern intellectual culture.
Abstracts for individual papers of 20 minutes should be between 250 and 350 words in length. For panel sessions of 1 hour and 30 minutes, a list of speakers and chair (with affiliations), a 500-word panel abstract, and individual abstracts from each speaker are required. Newly at Scientiae 2015, we also invite proposals for a limited number of topic-based roundtable sessions. These should feature brief presentations from 2 or 3 knowledgeable speakers on a defined but broad issue in early-modern intellectual history, with the intention of opening up multilateral discussion from the floor—the main business of the session. All submissions should be made by 17 November 2014 using the online form here.
We are also pleased to announce that Mario Biagioli (UC Davis), Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck), Peter Dear (Cornell), Anthony Grafton (Princeton), and Jonathan Sawday (SLU) have joined the Advisory Board of the Scientiae conferences.
Exhibition | Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland
Thomas Gainsborough, River Landscape with a View of a Distant Village, ca. 1748–50, oil on canvas, 30 x 60 inches (Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery)
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Press release from Art Daily:
Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland
The Frick Collection, New York, 5 November 2014 — 1 February 2015 (10 paintings)
de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 7 March — 31 May 2015
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 28 June — 20 September 2015
The National Galleries of Scotland will send a selection of major works from the national collection to the United States over the next year. This touring show will raise the international profile of the Galleries and draw attention to the superb quality and range of works held within Scotland’s national collections. It is also hoped that the exhibitions will help attract interest and financial support for the proposed redevelopment of the Scottish National Gallery. The project plans to radically overhaul and significantly expand galleries devoted to the national collection of historic Scottish art whilst also greatly improving visitor circulation and facilities.
Jean-Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Vénitiennes, 1718–19, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches (Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery)
In November 2014, ten masterpieces will go on display at The Frick Collection in New York. Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery will then travel with a further forty-five works to the de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The NGS has always maintained excellent relationships with partners all over the world and this tour will enable the NGS to strengthen these ties. The exhibition will include works by Raeburn, Ramsay, Constable, El Greco, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Velazquez, and Watteau. The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child by Sandro Botticelli will also be included. This work has never before been on public view in the United States.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland commented: “At a time of intense international interest in Scotland, this tour to some of the most prestigious venues in the world will be a significant boost to the profile of the Galleries, highlighting the outstanding quality of the national collections and encouraging more visitors to discover the extraordinarily rich heritage and culture of our country.” Michael Clarke, Director of the Scottish National Gallery, said: “The excellence of our collections will achieve wider recognition through this tour. It will enable us to fly the flag for Scotland in a country whose history has been greatly enriched by Scots over the centuries.”
Ruling on the Warburg Institute
Press release (6 November 2014) from Bates Wells Braithwaite and the Warburg Institute:
To the benefit and relief of scholars worldwide, the High Court has rejected the University of London’s claims that all additions to the Warburg Institute since 1944 belong to the University, and instead agreed that they form part of the Institute. Furthermore, the judge, Mrs Justice Proudman, held that the University is obliged to provide funding for the activities of the Warburg Institute.
Leticia Jennings of Bates Wells Braithwaite, who advised the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute, commented: “This decision ensures that the wealth of important material housed within the Institute will remain available, as before, in its entirety, and that the University will not be free to in any way restrict the access of the many scholars who use and rely on the Institute’s outstanding resources.”
The Institute grew out of the private library of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), who collected books in art history, literature, intellectual history, religion and the history of science and magic. As a Jewish institution based in Germany, the Institute was forced to close, and its very existence was threatened by the Nazi-organised book-burnings of April 1933. To escape destruction, the entire library of 60,000 books, as well as photographs, papers and furniture, were shipped to the safe-haven of London in December 1933. Many of the Institute’s staff also transferred to London.
After years of negotiation involving members of the Warburg Family, the University of London, distinguished scholars and philanthropists, the University of London became trustee of the Warburg Institute, to hold it on charitable trust pursuant to the terms of a 1944 Trust Deed*. The Institute has since grown into a world class teaching and research institute, much respected and sought after by academics worldwide.
The Trust Deed obliges the University to maintain and preserve the Warburg library in perpetuity, to house it, and to keep it adequately equipped and staffed as an independent unit. Leticia Jennings stated: “The contemporaneous evidence leading up to the signing of the Trust Deed shows that the transfer to the University of London was on the condition that the University accepted these obligations. This judgment has confirmed that the University must maintain the Institute as ‘an independent unit’, and that the University is not entitled to use the name and prestige associated with the Warburg Institute to obtain funds, but to then apply those funds to the University’s general purposes.”
In recent years the University had charged a proportion of its total estate expenditure to the Warburg Institute, meaning that the once solvent Institute was left with a significant deficit as it was used, in effect, to subsidise the University’s corporate property. The judge held that the University’s conduct in this regard is not permissible and “flies in the face” of the terms of Trust Deed.
Exhibition | Treasures of British Art 1400–2000: The Berger Collection
George Stubbs, A Saddled Bay Hunter, detail, oil on panel, 22 x 28 inches (The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum)
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From the PMA:
Treasures of British Art, 1400–2000: The Berger Collection
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, 2 October 2014 — 4 January 2015
Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, 25 January — 19 April 2015
Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, 14 August 2015 — 5 January 2016
Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, 10 June — 1 October 2017
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska 2 June — 9 September 2018
This fall, the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) will showcase a rich survey of British art spanning six centuries in the exhibition Treasures of British Art 1400–2000: The Berger Collection. Organized by the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition will feature 50 masterworks of British art by luminaries including Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Constable, Angelica Kauffman, and George Stubbs. The Berger Collection is one of the most impressive collections of British art in America, and this exhibition provides audiences the rare opportunity to see such a significant body of paintings in this region. The PMA is the first venue in this traveling show, which will be on view in Portland October 2, 2014 through January 4, 2015.
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With its diverse array of subjects and styles spanning six centuries of artistic practice, Treasures of British Art traces key developments in British art and culture through a chronological presentation of works. The earliest picture, a gilded altarpiece with a Crucifixion scene from circa 1395, is also an extremely rare surviving example of late Medieval religious painting—the type of object that was systematically destroyed in England when King Henry VIII broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. Portraiture has long been an important genre in British art, and this tradition is well-represented in the exhibition from the linear, decorative style of 16th-century portraits of Tudor royals and nobility, to the loosely brushed naturalism ushered in by Sir Anthony van Dyck and found in 17th- and 18th-century portraiture, to the expressionistic 21st-century image of the artist David Hockney by Adam Birtwistle. Marine paintings and landscapes of faraway places—including a monumental naval battle painting by Adriaen van Diest and a luminous harbor scene by John Constable—reflect not only shifting aesthetic approaches to the natural world, but also the importance of maritime life and overseas exchange in the history of the British Isles. History paintings, equestrian subjects, and other important genres of the British school in styles ranging from the traditional to modern round out the expansive breadth of the exhibition.
Benjamin West, Queen Charlotte, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 inches (The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum)
The Berger Collection is a major private collection largely of British art with a small but significant group of works by artists of other schools, including the French artist François Boucher and the American Winslow Homer. The late William M. B. Berger and his wife Bernadette Johnson Berger began amassing this collection in the mid-1990s out of their dual passion for British culture and for art’s potential to educate. Now owned by the Berger Collection Educational Trust and placed on long-term loan at the Denver Art Museum, the collection continues to expand through new acquisitions. The British paintings, drawings, and art objects number approximately 200 works and span more than six centuries—from the 14th to the 21st century. The very best paintings from this extraordinary collection have been selected for the traveling exhibition to fulfill the Berger family’s mission of sharing these masterpieces with a wide public audience.
The catalogue is available from ArtBooks.com:
Kathleen Stuart, Treasures of British Art, 1400–2000: The Berger Collection (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2014), 120 pages, ISBN: 9780914738923, $50.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue authored by Kathleen Stuart, Curator of the Berger Collection, with full-color plates and detailed entries on each of the works in the exhibition.
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Note (added 18 December 2014) — The original posting failed to include the Memphis and Provo venues.
Note (added 3 June 2018) — Earlier versions of the posting failed to include the Cincinnati and Omaha venues.
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