CAA News

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) invites CAA members to gather at the Four Seasons in midtown Manhattan next month for conversation about the restaurant’s historical developments. This free event takes place on Saturday, September 25, 2010, at 9:00 PM.

The gathering concludes a tour day in which SAH members will have spent studying the work of Richard Kelly, who was responsible for the interior and exterior lighting of the Seagram Building and the Four Seasons. Joining the group will be Belmont Freeman, the restaurant’s current restoration architect, and Dietrich Neumann, the tour leader, past SAH president, and editor of the forthcoming book, The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture. (The tour is sold out.)

The Four Seasons opened in 1959 to breathless headlines about the “world’s costliest restaurant,” which took an unprecedented $4.5 million to build. Occupying a monumental space on the first floor of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, the restaurant was designed by Philip Johnson in collaboration with a stellar cast of artists, including Kelly, William Pahlman (interior designer to Restaurant Associates), Karl Linn (landscape architect), and Garth Huxtable (industrial designer). In addition, Kelly created the sculptures that hover over the Bar Room, Marie Nichols made the shimmering aluminum chain window shades, and Treitel-Gratz fabricated the Mies-designed Brno and Barcelona chairs (this being before Knoll put them into production.) Blue-chip art, including a stage backdrop painted by Pablo Picasso, adorned the walls.

During his lifetime Johnson kept close control over the maintenance, alteration, and periodic refurbishment of the restaurant, which the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission named an interior landmark in 1989 and which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Four years after Johnson’s death in 2005, the owners decided that the Four Seasons needed a new house architect to design and direct urgently needed restorations and, as Phyllis Lambert phrased it in her brief in support of the work, to “monitor and safeguard the architectural and artistic patrimony” of the establishment. Freeman was selected for this role. Since December 2008, Belmont Freeman Architects (BFA) and a team of consultants have been immersed in researching the history, design, and construction of the restaurant, and in designing and managing its phased restoration.

The Four Seasons is not a museum but a busy working restaurant. As such, its renovation is subject to particular functional, logistical, and economic exigencies. Since the restaurant cannot close for renovation, work is planned as a series of surgical interventions that can be performed off hours. After completing an assessment of existing conditions, BFA compiled and ranked discrete restoration subprojects by priority. While the main dining rooms have been admirably maintained over the years, ancillary spaces—entrance, lobby, restrooms, coat check, stairs, bar—have suffered fifty years of abuse and are in urgent need of renovation. Another important object of attention is the lighting: the historical importance of Kelly’s pioneering lighting design is equal to—and inseparable from—that of the architecture. BFA is working with lighting designer WALD Studio and with Edison Price, manufacturers of the original fixtures, on this restoration program.

There is no charge to attend this cash-bar event. On entering the Four Seasons, say you are with the Society of Architectural Historians group. Have questions or need additional information? Please contact Kathy Sturm, SAH director of programs, at 312-543-7243.

The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (ACUMG), a CAA affiliated society, has changed its name to the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). The organization has also strengthened its mission to better reflect its role as the leading educational and professional organization for museums and galleries affiliated with academic institutions.

The formal name change, which more closely links AAMG to its affiliate organization, the American Association of Museums (AAM), took place at AAMG’s annual business meeting in Los Angeles on May 24, 2010. At the same meeting AAMG revised its by-laws and invigorated its mission as a resource for college and university museums of all disciplines, including art, history, anthropology, natural history, and science.

Organized in 1980, the association has a growing membership of more than four hundred of the nation’s estimated 1,150 academic museums and galleries. AAMG addresses such issues as governance, ethics, collections management, educational outreach, exhibitions, strategic planning, and financial management. Along with CAA, it has been in the forefront of the movement to safeguard college and university collections, advocating against the sale of donated artworks and the closure of art museums by institutions of higher education.

AAMG sponsors national conferences at prominent academic museums in conjunction with annual AAM meetings. Its May 22 conference took place at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) invites CAA members to take a study tour of Mexico City. The tour’s focus will be modern and contemporary architecture, but because some knowledge of older styles, contemporary issues across the arts, and the growth of the city itself are critical to understanding Mexican modern architecture, the tour will include pre-twentieth-century buildings and works of art and urban planning that inform the development of Mexican architectural modernism in essential ways.

The study program is designed to include famous, “must-see” sites in Mexico City as well as buildings that participants may not know and that they might find difficult to visit. Download a detailed brochure and register online to reserve a space on the tour. CAA members need not be members of SAH but will pay a $25 administration fee to attend, in addition to the tour-package cost. Space is limited, so please make your reservations today!

Image: The Basilica of Guadalupe on top of Tepeyac hill, north of Mexico City, was built between 1974 and 1976 by the Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (photograph provided by Kathryn O’Rourke and the Society of Architectural Historians)

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), a CAA affiliated society, has announced the 2011 recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award: Beverly Buchanan, Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann, and Sylvia Sleigh.

The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishments and contributions represented by their professional efforts.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held in New York on Saturday evening, February 12, 2011, in conjunction with the WCA and CAA Annual Conferences. More details and ticket information will be posted this summer to the WCA website. For more on the awards, please contact Karin Luner, WCA national administrator.

Beverly Buchanan

Born in 1940, Beverly Buchanan began creating art at an early age. She received a bachelor’s degree in medical technology from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then earned a master’s of science in parasitology and a master’s of public health degree, both from Columbia University. Rather than pursuing a degree in medicine, she decided to focus on making art. Buchanan studied at the Art Students League before moving to Georgia, where she still lives, dividing her time between there and Michigan. Her early sculptures were poured concrete and stone, and she has since worked in a variety of media, focusing on southern vernacular architecture. Buchanan is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In addition, she was a Georgia Visual Arts honoree and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and was honored with a Recognition Award by CAA’s Committee for Women in the Arts in 2005.

Diane Burko

A painter and photographer who resides in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Diane Burko has been involved in the feminist movement since the early 1970s. She is a founding member of WCA who also founded and organized the first multivenue feminist citywide art festival in Philadelphia, called “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, Past and Present,” also known as “Focus.” After that event, Burko continued her feminist commitment to the present day, serving on the WCA and CAA boards and on the Philadelphia Art Commission. She is now the chair of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts. Burko has been recognized with fellowships from the Bellagio Center, the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other honors. One of the first movers and shakers in the feminist art movement, Burko has not yet been fully recognized for her important contributions.

Ofelia Garcia

Ofelia Garcia is professor of art at William Paterson University, where she was dean of the College of the Arts and Communication for a decade. She earned her BA at Manhattanville College and her MFA at Tufts University, and was a Kent fellow at Duke University. Garcia has been on the art faculty at Boston College, a critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, director of the Print Center in Philadelphia, and president of the Atlanta College of Art and Rosemont College. Also a former president of WCA, Garcia has served on numerous boards, including those of CAA, the American Council on Education, and Haverford College; she was most recently board chair of the Jersey City Museum. Garcia now serves as vice chair of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, on the Hudson County Art Commission, and on the boards of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions and Catholics for Choice.

Joan Marter

Joan Marter is distinguished professor of art history at Rutgers University. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware and has lectured and published widely. She is currently editor-in-chief of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, a five-volume reference set forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2010. Marter serves as editor of Woman’s Art Journal, in print continuously for thirty-one years. She has published monographs on artists such as Alexander Calder and has written extensively about Abstract Expressionism and women artists. In 2004, she was inducted into the Alumni Wall of Fame at the University of Delaware. Marter is currently president of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose radical works in performance art, installation, film, and video are widely influential. The history of her imagery is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Her involvement in collaborative groups includes the Judson Dance Theater, Experiments in Art and Technology, and many feminist organizations. Schneemann has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Internationally, she has shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. Her recent multichannel video installation Precarious was presented at Tate Liverpool in September 2009. The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz is currently presenting a major retrospective, on view through July 25, 2010.

Sylvia Sleigh

Born in 1916 in Wales, Sylvia Sleigh paints portraits in a realist style, informed by sources ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to famous portraits throughout history. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery; her most recent, at I-20 Gallery in New York, closed in January 2010. She married the art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954, with whom she became part of the London avant-garde. They later moved to the United States, where she continued painting and showing her work. In 1970, Sleigh became actively involved in feminism and started painting life-size nudes in her precise, realist style. She was active in many of the first women-artist-run galleries, including A.I.R. Gallery and Soho 20. Her work can be found in numerous major public and private collections. Sleigh was honored with CAA’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.

At its February meeting in Chicago, the Board of Directors approved the applications of two groups to join CAA’s affiliated societies. The first new affiliate, the Appraisers Association of America, is a professional organization, while the second, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, is an area-studies organization.

The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) began in 1949; it currently has 650 members. Its purpose is to establish the highest standards of ethical conduct and promote the profession of appraising as a service to the national economy. An admissions committee insures that its members have met the standards of the profession. AAA advances the field though educational seminars, conferences, publications, and other activities. It publishes All About Appraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handbook and a biannual newsletter, and it offers classes in collaboration with New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. CAA recently partnered with AAA to host a symposium on art authentication in January 2010.

An affiliate of the Middle East Studies Association, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) was established in 2007, and it currently has fifty-seven members. This newly formed academic organization aims to advance the study of this emerging field through the creation of an international network of interested scholars and organizations. AMCA facilitates communications by sponsoring conferences, meetings, a website, and a newsletter. It will be launching peer-reviewed exhibition and catalogue reviews on its website.

CAA’s Directory of Affiliated Societies is currently accepting updates. If you are an officer or the official CAA contact for an organization, please send an updated text, in the same format as the listing, to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, by March 31, either as a Word attachment or paste within an email.

“Authenticating Art: Current Problems and Proposed Solutions” was the topic for a panel presentation and discussion sponsored by CAA and the Appraisers Association of America. Held on January 20, 2010, the event was hosted by and took place in the auditorium of the Levin Institute in Manhattan for its 120 guests.

The panelists were: John Cahill of the New York–based law firm Lynn and Cahill; Jane Jacob from Jacob Fine Art, an art consultancy in Chicago; James Martin of Orion Analytical, a materials analysis and consultancy firm based in Williamstown, Massachusetts; and Jane Levine from the auction house Sotheby’s New York. Michele Marincola, a professor of conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, served as moderator for the discussion.

CAA’s new best practices on Authentications and Attributions, approved in October 2009, played an important referential role among myriad opinions offered by legal experts, conservators, gallery owners, and material analysts—to say nothing of the various aspects of law that may apply to collectors, buyers and sellers, appraisers, and auction houses. Indeed, the guidelines were praised by panelists and audience members for their “reasoned and thoughtful advice” and recommended repeatedly as an essential resource on the subject.

Panel presentations cited specific circumstances surrounding well-known art forgeries by Greek and Roman sculptors from as far back as two millennia, to more recent master forgerers, including Elmyr de Hory, Eric Hebborn, John Myatt, and Leo Nardus. One of the most famous forgeries by Han van Meegeren, of Johannes Vemeer’s Supper at Emmaus, was completed in 1937 and sold for what today would be well over $2.5 million. Some forgerers also borrowed authentic works of art from collectors, copied the work, returned the undetected copy to the owner, and then sold the original to a third party. Historical and modern-day problems with attribution, revelations during conservation procedures, and new analytical techniques and forensic equipment were also presented. Similarly, matters of law such as breach of contract, false certificates of authenticity, and false (but not criminal) representation or court testimony were highlighted.

The evening was informative, provocative, and timely but lacked one critical professional perspective: namely, that of the art historian, art-museum curator, or art connoisseur. Indeed, art-historical documentation, stylistic connoisseurship, and scientific analysis are the three aspects of authentication that create a “consensus of evidence” as recommended in the CAA guidelines. Were it not for this shortcoming, the event would have enlightened even further the practice, if not the controversy, of art authentication.

For interested members who will attend CAA’s centennial Annual Conference in New York in 2011, the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (a CAA affiliated society) will present a panel on authentication that addresses issues confronted by art historians and curators who authenticate.

—Michael Fahlund is CAA deputy director.

CAA welcomes two art organizations into its family of affiliated societies: the European Architectural History Network and Public Art Dialogue. Affiliated societies are groups of art professionals and other organizations whose goals are generally consonant with those of CAA, with a view toward facilitating intercommunication and mutual enrichment.

The European Architectural History Network (EAHN) supports research and education by providing a public forum for the dissemination of knowledge about the histories of architecture. Based in Europe, it serves architectural historians and scholars in allied fields without restriction on their areas of study. The network seeks to overcome limitations imposed by national boundaries and institutional conventions through increasing the visibility of the discipline among scholars and the public; promoting scholarly excellence and innovation; fostering inclusive, transnational, interdisciplinary, and multicultural approaches to the history of the built environment; encouraging communication among the disciplines that study space; facilitating the open exchange of research results; and providing a clearinghouse for information related to the discipline.

Public Art Dialogue (PAD), cochaired by Harriet F. Senie and Cher Krause Knight, is an organization devoted to public art. Its membership includes art historians, artists, curators, administrators, architects, landscape architects, and others engaged with the wide arc that encompasses public art. PAD’s goal is to provide platforms for dialogue among public-art professionals and students across disciplines.

For more information on CAA’s affiliated societies, please write to Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs.

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has selected five recipients for its 2009 Lifetime Achievement Awards:

• Maren Hassinger, director of the Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art
• Ester Hernandez, a San Francisco–based artist who was a pioneer in the Chicana/Chicano civil rights art movement
• Joyce Kozloff, a political and feminist artist who was a founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s
• Margo Machida, a renowned authority on contemporary Asian American art and visual culture and associate professor at the University of Connecticut
• Ruth Weisberg, an artist and dean of fine arts at the University of Southern California

The awards ceremony will be held at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 28, 2009, in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference. This ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be the thirtieth anniversary of the awards. As in past years, the awards ceremony will include an accompanying catalogue, outlining the awardees’ accomplishments in greater detail. Please check the WCA website for more details about the ceremony (free), the awards dinner (tickets are $90 before December 1, 2008, and $105 after), and other planned events.