CAA News

The cover image of the June 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin shows the unmistakable signature style of the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who has also written the lead text for the issue’s Notes from the Field. In this section, nine scholars from divergent fields—among them Kirk Ambrose, Elizabeth Edwards, Cordula Grewe, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and Ian McLean—join the artist in writing on the theme of appropriation. The June issue presents the second installment of new features in The Art Bulletin, sections that will continue for several years in the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In Regarding Art and Art History, Andrew Hemingway revisits his early fascination with a John Constable painting, Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–27), and describes how the work has shaped his methodological approach to writing art history. Finally, in a wide-ranging interview with Dan Karlholm, the art historian Linda Nochlin discusses her five-decade career.

The June Art Bulletin features four essays that cover a wide range of topics and time periods in the history of art. Sonya S. Lee examines the role of patronage and appropriation in tenth-century Dunhuang through her analysis of the pictorial program of Cave 61 at Mogao in northwestern China. Kishwar Rizvi’s article explores the dynamic relationship between image and text in the 1605 manuscript Shahnama (Book of Kings) and how the folio’s paintings can be viewed as a surrogate portrait of the charismatic king, Shah ‘Abbas. Next, Katherine M. Kuenzli explores the “total work of art” that is Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theater Building and its role in shaping German modernism and national identity before and after World War I. In “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars,” Christine Poggi analyzes the artist’s 1912 paper Guitar as a modernist masterpiece unto itself, and not merely as the model for subsequent versions made from sheet metal; Poggi’s essay also features unusual new photographs of several paper sculptures that she discusses.

In the Reviews section, Cammy Brothers assesses Marvin Trachtenberg’s book, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion, and Diane H. Bodart reviews two books, Joanna Woodall’s Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority and Laura R. Bass’s The Drama of the Portrait: Theatre and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. Then, Victor I. Stoichita looks at Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio, and Jonathan Hay discusses Craig Clunas’s approach to Chinese art history through a reading of five of his recent books on the subject. Finally, Barbara Wittmann reviews two catalogues—The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Reconsidering Gérôme—that accompanied a 2011 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Please see the full table of contents for June to learn more. CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership.

The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in September 2012, will feature the art historian Richard Shiff on the concept of interpretation in Regarding Art and Art History, “contingency” as the topic in Notes from the Field, and an interview with the architectural historian James S. Ackerman. The long-form essays will examine iconoclasm and the image as representation in the eighth century, Francesco Rosselli’s engravings and the development of print culture in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century Chinese handscroll painting, and the trials of the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Giotto, Willem de Kooning, civil rights, photography, and the image of the wind.

CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations from one member/individual with a specialization in a historic period in Asian, Southeast Asian, American, or Pre-Columbian art to serve on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, ending on June 30, 2016. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.

The Meiss jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications twice a year and meet in New York in the spring and fall to select the awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: August 8, 2012.

This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late professor Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.

The six grantees for spring 2012 are:

• Todd Cronan, Matisse, Bergson, and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, University of Minnesota Press
• John J. Curley, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cold War Visuality: A Conspiracy of Images, Yale University Press
• Laurinda Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Dorothy Habel, “When All of Rome Was under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Lozoff Brittenham, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Paintings of Bonampak, University of Texas Press
• Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist, Yale University Press

Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the fall 2012 grant cycle is October 1, 2012.

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for one member-at-large to serve on its Publications Committee for a three-year term, July 1, 2012–June 30, 2015. Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the committee’s work.

Meeting three times a year, the Publications Committee is a consultative body that advises the CAA Publications Department staff and the CAA Board of Directors on publications projects. It supervises the editorial boards of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews, as well as CAA’s book-grant juries; sponsors a practicum session at the Annual Conference; and, with the CAA vice president for publications, serves as liaison to the board, membership, editorial boards, book-grant juries, and other CAA committees.

The Publications Committee meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference. Members of all CAA committees volunteer their services without compensation.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. In addition, they may not be individuals who have served as members of a CAA editorial board within the past five years. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Appointments are made by the CAA president in consultation with the vice president for publications. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Publications Committee, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Alyssa Pavley, CAA editorial assistant. Deadline: May 2, 2012.

The 2013 Call for Participation for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16 in New York, describes many of next year’s programs sessions. CAA and the session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals and describes the eight Open Forms sessions.

Listing more than 120 panels, the 2013 Call for Participation was mailed to all individual and institutional members in late March; you can also download a PDF of the twenty-five-page document from the CAA website immediately.

The deadline for proposals of papers and presentations for the New York conference is May 4, 2012.

In addition to dozens of wide-ranging panels on art history, studio art, contemporary issues, and professional and educational practices, CAA conference attendees can expect participation from many area schools, museums, galleries, and other institutions. The Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan is the conference headquarters, holding most sessions, Career Services, the Book and Trade Fair, ARTspace, special events, and more. Deadline: May 4, 2012.

Contact

For more information about proposals of papers and presentations for the 2013 Annual Conference, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, at 212-392-4405.

Since membership fees cover less than half of CAA’s operating costs, voluntary contributions from members significantly help to facilitate the wide range of programs and services that the organization offers. In the Acknowledgments section of its website, CAA recognizes the distinguished contributors for each of the following in calendar year 2011:

• The Centennial Campaign celebrates CAA’s one hundredth anniversary, a celebratory landmark for any organization but particularly so for CAA given its dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts
• The Donors Circle of Patron, Sponsoring, and Sustaining Members includes individuals who contribute to CAA above and beyond their regular dues
• Life Members are individuals who make one-time payments of $5,000 and remain active CAA members for life
• The Art Bulletin Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s preeminent scholarly journal covering all areas and periods of art history
• The Art Journal Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s cutting-edge quarterly of contemporary art and ideas
• The caa.reviews Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s online journal devoted to critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies
• The Annual Conference Travel Grants help cover expenses for graduate students in art history and studio art, and for international artists and scholars, who attend the CAA Annual Conference

CAA offers additional ways to contribute to the organization. Through Planned Giving, you can include CAA in your will. You can also purchase Benefit Prints by the artists Willie Cole and Buzz Spector or a collection of Art Journal Artists’ Projects by Barbara Bloom, Clifton Meador, Mary Lum, and William Pope.L. For general inquiries on CAA’s campaigns and funds, please contact Hannah O’Reilly Malyn, CAA development associate, at 212-392-4435.

 

CAA is accepting applications for spring 2012 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher but require further subsidy to be published in the fullest form.

The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: April 1, 2012.

Three new series of features are introduced in the March 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin. They will appear in the next two volume years of the journal, along with the long-form essays and reviews that have made it the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In her introductory editor’s note, Karen Lang writes that she created the new features “to reflect the vibrancy of art history today and to stimulate dialogue across fields and with neighboring disciplines.”

In the first new series, “Regarding Art and Art History,” a leading scholar offers a short personal reflection on what it means to write art history; the inaugural writer is Anne M. Wagner, whose essay takes the form of a letter. “Notes from the Field” will present short texts on a given topic by ten authors from a variety of disciplines; the first topic is anthropomorphism, with texts by the artist Elizabeth King, the philosopher J. M. Bernstein, and eight other scholars, including Finbarr Barry Flood, Jane Garnett, and James Meyer. Each issue will feature an interview as well; the first is a dialogue between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the art historian Philip Ursprung. Julia Gelshorn launches the feature with a critical essay on the techniques, strategies, and study of the artist interview.

The March issue also features three essays on diverse topics. In “Henry Fuseli: Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism,” Andrei Pop examines the art of the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli in relation to the eighteenth-century revival of Greek tragedy and the formation of the modern liberal version of cultural pluralism. Yukio Lippit’s article, “Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495,” explores a single work by the Zen monk painter Sesshū Tōyō in the context of the ink painting tradition and artistic transmission in medieval Japan. In her essay, “Agent Provocateur? The African Origin and American Life of a Statue from Côte d’Ivoire,” Monica Blackmun Visonà studies the “biography” of a statue, sculpted near the Lagoon region of Ivory Coast and later donated to Fisk University by Georgia O’Keeffe, as a microcosm of American art history in the twentieth century.

In the Reviews section, Sheila Dillon evaluates Richard Neer’s book, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, and Julian Gardner considers The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France by Stephen Perkinson. Next, Gerhard Wolf looks at the temporality of Renaissance art as described in Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronistic Renaissance. Finally, Marc Fumaroli reviews Walter S. Melion’s book, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print (1550–1625).

Please see the full table of contents for March to learn more. CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership.

The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in June 2012, will feature a “Notes from the Field” section on appropriation and an interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin. The long-form essays will examine artifacts from a tenth-century cave in northwestern China, portraiture and narrative in the 1605 Shahnama (Book of Kings), theater architecture in the 1914 Werkbund exhibition, and Pablo Picasso’s 1912 paper construction Guitar. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Caravaggio, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Spanish portraiture, the art of early modern China, and the temporality of architecture.

The latest issue of Art Journal, mailed in February, is dedicated to manifestations of print, from the cultural roles of published artifacts in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries (by Michael Leja and the editors of the collective Triple Canopy respectively) to artist’s projects by Richard Tuttle and Matthew Brannon that exploit the physical conditions of the printed journal itself.

The final Art Journal Centennial essay by Sarah Suzuki surveys up-to-the-moment practices in printmaking, while a piece by Harper Montgomery focuses on a Mexico City street exhibition of prints in 1929 as an instance of the political dimensions of distributing art prints. Finally, an essay by Bruce Hainley, “Store as Cunt,” explores the subversive 1960s work of the artist Sturtevant.

The Triple Canopy essay, “The Binder and the Server,” which received the 2012 Art Journal Award at the CAA Annual Conference last month, and Seth McCormick’s review of Hiroko Ikegami’s book The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art are featured as free content on the journal’s website.

CAA’s 100th Annual Conference takes place this week: Wednesday–Saturday, February 22–25, 2012 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Checking In

Early, advance, complimentary, exhibitor, and press registrants can check in at the registration area in Concourse Foyer, Level 1, at the Los Angeles Convention Center beginning Tuesday, February 21, at 5:00 PM. Each registrant is entitled to a conference tote bag, the Conference Program, the Directory of Attendees, online access to Abstracts 2012, and entry to the Book and Trade Fair (open Thursday–Saturday). Your tickets to special events and workshops will be included in your registration packet. If you have not yet purchased tickets for the Centennial Reception and for professional-development workshops, you can do so at registration. These tickets are subject to limited availability.

Registration days and hours are:

• Tuesday, February 21, 5:00–7:00 PM
• Wednesday-Friday, February 22–24, 8:00 AM–7:00 PM
• Saturday, February 25, 8:30 AM–2:30 PM

Plan Ahead

Two large, non-CAA events—ceremonies for newly naturalized US citizens—will take place on Wednesday, February 22, at 9:00 AM and at 1:30 PM. Approximately ten thousand new citizens and their guests are expected to attend each ceremony. CAA strongly recommends that you check in at registration on Tuesday evening. If you arrive on Wednesday, please allow yourself ample time before your first session.

Parking

Parking at the convention center is available in either the West Hall or the South Hall parking lots. The West Hall parking is closest to the conference and located off LA Live Way, between 11th Street and Pico Boulevard, The entrance to South Hall parking is off Venice Boulevard, west of Figueroa Street. Convention-center parking costs $12 per day (subject to change). Overflow parking areas can be found nearby—please download and review this map. Parking rates vary from $10 to $25 per day, and most lots have a daily rate of less than $20 per day. All parking is first-come first-served. For more information, contact the Los Angeles Convention Parking Office at 213-741-1151, ext. 5850.

Hotel Discounts and Shuttle

The Millennium Biltmore has a few rooms left in the CAA block. Prices start at $120 per night for students. Call 800-245-8673 to make your reservation. CAA offers a free shuttle-bus service between the convention center and the Westin Bonaventure and the Millennium Biltmore. The JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE and the Figueroa Hotel are within easy walking distance of the convention center.

Abstracts

Your conference registration includes access to the Abstracts 2012, which is available online as a PDF. This publication is not available in print. Log into your CAA account using your CAA User/Member ID# and password and click the Abstracts 2012 icon on the welcome screen to download the 1.9 MB document. If you do not know your User/Member ID# or password, follow the help instructions on the log-in screen.