Awards
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, named in honor of one of the founding members of CAA and first teachers of art history in the United States, was established in 1953. This award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language. Preference is given to books, including catalogues raisonnés, by a single author, but major publications in the form of articles or group studies may be included. Publication of documents or inventories, unless specifically in the context of an exhibition, are also eligible. The 2013 award year covers books published between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012.
2013 Finalists
The four finalists for the 2013 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award are:
- Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
- Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
- Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)
- J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012)
The winners of this year’s prize, along with the recipients of eleven other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in New York, in conjunction with the 101st Annual Conference.
2012 Winner
Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011)
Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a compelling reexamination of the key paradoxes that define this era and the works associated with it. Guided in part by sixteenth-century religious history and the writings of historians of that era, Nagel positions sixteenth-century art making in the realm of the experimental, a vantage also in concert with the efforts of religious reformers concerned with ritual and devotional practices usually associated with the Middle Ages. A breakthrough volume that makes significant contributions to scholarship on sixteenth-century Italian art, Nagel’s book motivates art historians more generally to reconsider “standard” interpretations of many canonical monuments of the periods in which they are working.
Past Winners
The first Morey award went to H. W. Janson in 1956 for Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He also received the award again in 1961 for Sculpture of Donatello. A three-time winner, Erwin Panofsky, was recognized for Early Netherlandish Painting (1957), Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1964), and Tomb Sculpture (1968). Since then, a wide range of books covering all areas and periods of art history have been awarded, including, most recently, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low’s Artisans in Early Imperial China (2009), Elizabeth C. Mansfield’s Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (2008), and Peter Selz’s Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (2007).
Read a list of all winners of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from 1956 to the present, as well as a list of finalists from 1996 to the present.
Award Nominations
CAA will begin accepting nominations for the 2014 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in spring 2013.
