The Art Bulletin

This essay examines how art history, like other disciplines and societies, defines itself through order and classification. From many possibilities, it considers three examples: a listing of fields of art history, a library system for classifying art books, and the plotting of space and time in art history survey texts. Central to the discussion is the geography of art history. How and why do disciplinary classifications that aspire to be global remain local? What are the consequences of our continued use of mappings that have their origins and bases in geopolitical spaces that no longer exist?

This paper argues for a reevaluation of Aby Warburg by attending to the theoretical concerns underpinning his study of the Renaissance. It argues that Warburg’s oeuvre has an overarching perspective, namely, an engagement with the emergence of specifically ``modern'' culture based on rationalization and the ``disenchantment'' of nature. This suggests parallels with Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, and others. Consequently, Warburg appears as more than a gatherer of philological, historical, and art historical information. Instead, his work takes its place among the widespread and influential philosophical, anthropological, and cultural-theoretical analyses of modernity dominating early twentieth-century German intellectual life.

This essay examines the function of the mask in Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, in relation to the artist’s anxious confrontation with lesbian sexuality and his own gendered identity. In examining the portrait as a performative event between the artist and the sitter, the essay attempts to shed light on the significance of the delay in Picasso’s completion of the painting and the problem of gender instability in his art over the course of 1906-7. Recent work in gender and queer studies provides the theoretical armature for the argument.

Edouard Vuillard is said to have dwelled in a ``saturated feminine world,'' yet there are striking and unexplained anomalies in his early representations of that world. This paper locates the radical figurations of Vuillard’s 1890s paintings of his mother and sister in a larger social, theoretical, and historical framework. The early discourses on decoration and abstraction are mined to illuminate an objectification of the female body that was simultaneously pictorial, psychological, and sexual, the implications of which have been obscured by Vuillard’s long-standing reputation as a feminine painter.

This essay situates Alexander Cozens’s technique of ``blotting'' as expounded in his New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785) in the contemporaneous classical tradition of Reynolds and the Royal Academy. While most scholarship has discussed the ``suggestive'' and ``abstract'' qualities of the blot in the context of Romanticism and even modernism, the author here locates a widespread debate on painterly ``techniques of generalization'' in academic and picturesque theory, a debate specifically directed toward contemporaneous epistemological concerns.

Paintings carried in triumphal processions, specifically commissioned to commemorate victorious military campaigns, not only added immensely to the celebratory nature of the rite, they also increased its tendentious power. Although none of these paintings survives, literary sources provide crucial alternate evidence to determine their role in shaping Roman political and artistic culture in the Republican period. This article examines that evidence to explore the significance of propagandistic art in Roman society, to ascertain what triumphal paintings may have looked like, and finally to assess how Roman audiences responded to them.