CAA News Today

Zena Pearlstone is emeritus professor of art history at California State University, Fullerton.

Michael Kabotie with his work at the Del Rio Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona

Michael Kabotie (Lomawywesa), a Hopi painter, jeweler, poet, and printmaker, died in Flagstaff, Arizona, on October 23, 2009, of complications from H1N1 influenza. He was 67.

Kabotie is known among Hopi artists as one who commanded several media and constantly pushed his iconographic and technical skills. His work was always powerful and often mystical. Kabotie worked with the mythology and sentiments of his people, but he described his art as pushing back in time in an attempt to arrive at the roots or basics of Hopi teachings that would promote a common understanding. His intelligence was far reaching. Some people think outside the box, but for him there never was a box.

Kabotie was born in 1942 at Songoopovi, Second Mesa, Hopi, a member of the Snow-Water clan and the son of the artist Fred Kabotie and Alice Kabotie. He attended Hopi High School, where he studied art with his father, and in 1961 graduated from the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. He began studies in engineering but did not complete the program, preferring to devote his full attention to his art. He lived at Hopi and also, for many years, in Flagstaff and New Mexico.

During the sixties and into the seventies Kabotie’s work was influenced by ancestral Pueblo art and European modernism. In the 1960 and 1961 Southwest Indian Art Project summer program at the University of Arizona, he studied with the Cochiti artist Joe Herrera, who introduced him to the kiva murals at the Hopi site of Awotovi. Herrera, Kabotie said, opened his eyes to the art of his people. The murals and the related Sikyatki pottery images remained a reference for Kabotie throughout his career. At his 1967 initiation into the Wuwtsim (a priesthood society) Kabotie received the name Lomawywesa, “Walking in Harmony.” The ceremony led him to consider the art of his ancestors as more central than modern art.

Still it was important to Kabotie to work with other artists in a modernist style that extracted elements from ancient sources. In 1973 he was a founding member of Artist Hopid, a group of five contemporary Hopi artists who felt the need to communicate their cultural and artistic experiences. Speaking for the group Kabotie said, “We hoped that from the presentation of our traditions and from the interpretations of the Hopi way in our art and paintings a new direction would come for American spirituality.” In 1996, he continued his search for basic truths when he began sharing canvases with Jack Dauben, who is of Celtic ancestry.

Michael Kabotie, silver pendant, 2004

Kabotie began silversmithing seriously in the late 1970s. His unique work modified Hopi overlay into three-dimensional pieces, a process most Hopi jewelers would never attempt. One stunning 2001 bracelet with Awotovi designs is built like a box, squared and hollow, an astounding construction feat.

Kabotie’s painting and jewelry were incorporated into large public works, including murals at Sunset Crater Visitors Center in Arizona; a large mural, Journey of the Human Spirit, made with Delbridge Honanie and now in the Kiva Gallery at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff; and a gate at the Heard Museum in Phoenix designed to look like a piece of overlay jewelry.

Kabotie was a Southwestern force and in all his endeavors an ambassador for Hopi while absorbing the ideas of other cultures. In a career of almost fifty years, he was involved, as either participant or consultant, in myriad projects concerning Southwest and Californian art and culture. He worked with indigenous artists in New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico; had exhibitions in fourteen US states, South America, Europe, and New Zealand; and served as an advisor to the Heard Museum, the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and the Idyllwild California Summer Arts program at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. At the latter Kabotie taught Hopi overlay jewelry techniques for almost twenty years. His work is held by museums in the United States and Europe. In 2003 he received the Arizona Indian Living Treasure Award.

He was a warm and caring person and a wonderful friend. His thoughtfulness and his humor went hand in hand. He was a quick wit and always the trickster. “Come have Thanksgiving with us,” he asked one year. “We have too many Indians and not enough Pilgrims.”

Kabotie leaves a monumental body of work that will be admired and influential for many years. He leaves a large family and a multitude of friends, all of whom adored and respected him.

Jay Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities, professor of philosophy, and director of the Logic Program and of the Five College Tibetan Studies in India Program at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is also professor in the graduate faculty of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, professor of philosophy at Melbourne University, and adjunct professor of philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies.

Bernard Allen Hanson, an art historian, critic, professor, and administrator, died on June 21, 2009, after a short illness. He was 86. For years he was recognized around New Haven, Connecticut, by his blue pickup truck with its elegantly lettered moniker, “Bernard Hanson. Art Critic.”

The youngest of five children, Hanson was born to Stephen Bernard (Bert) Hanson and Stella Cook Hanson on October 11, 1922, in Williamsburg, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1944 with a degree in English. While at the university he was a two-time Big Ten gymnastics champion, performing on the side horse, and was a member of the Scottish Highlanders. He earned his MA in art history at the same school and pursued doctoral research at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Hanson enjoyed a distinguished career in art history. His research, teaching, and public lectures addressed the history of Indian art, the nature of public art, the history of architecture, and film theory. Hanson was not only a noted scholar, but also an eminent academic leader and a public intellectual. His teaching career spanned four decades, and included appointments at Northwestern University, the Philadelphia College of Art, and the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. Hanson served as director of the Humanities Division at the Philadelphia College of Art and as dean at the Hartford School of Art from 1970 to 1979 before returning to the teaching faculty until his retirement in 1987.

Hanson said once in an interview, “Before people are anything, they are human beings, and education in an art school should be basically humanistic,” and his approach to teaching, to academic leadership, and to public comment on the arts reflected this sentiment. His tenure as dean at Hartford was notable for the steady stream of distinguished artists he invited to visit the school, for the installations and happenings he initiated, for the vibrancy of the community under his leadership, and for his curricular innovations, encouraging broader academic study by art students. The Hartford Art School recently recognized his contributions by endowing the Bernard Hanson Scholarship for promising artists with financial need.

Hanson was a noted New England art critic, contributing for over two decades to the West Hartford News, the Hartford Courant (where he received an honorable mention in a national art criticism competition sponsored by Art/World Magazine), and the Middletown Press. His columns were noteworthy for their ability to bring serious erudition to bear in commentary accessible to ordinary readers.

After retiring from the University of Hartford, Hanson volunteered in Literacy Volunteers of America and as a teacher’s aide in Miss DeNuzzo’s second-grade class at the East Rock School in New Haven. He derived as much joy from contributing in these contexts as he did from his academic career.

Hanson was preceded in death by his wife and fellow art historian, Anne Coffin Hanson. He is survived by his daughter, Bridget, his stepchildren Robert, James, and Blaine Garson, his nephew Stephen, and their families, as well as his beloved dog, Sheldon.

Memorial contributions can be made to the Bernard Hanson Endowed Scholarship at the University of Hartford or the SPCA of Connecticut.

Clark V. Poling is professor emeritus of art history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

John Howett

John Howett, professor of art history at Emory University for thirty years, died on April 8, 2009, at the age of 82. A founding member of the Art History Department and active with numerous arts organizations in Atlanta, he nurtured the careers of many artists and undergraduate and graduate students both in art history and in the interdisciplinary Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.

After serving with the US infantry in the Philippines and Japan during World War II, Howett began his career in art as a student at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, earning a BFA. He received an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in Illinois, specializing in early Italian Renaissance art; during this time he was curator of the University of Notre Dame Art Gallery as well as associate professor at that university.

Arriving at Emory in 1966, Howett helped develop the Art History Department and its graduate program, summer-abroad program in Europe, and collection of works of art on paper, which subsequently became part of Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. He was revered as a teacher and mentor, having received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, the Award for Outstanding Teaching and Service to Undergraduate Students, and the Arts and Sciences Award of Distinction. Recently, a former student established the John Howett Travel Fund for Advanced Undergraduate Seminars in Art History in his honor.

Howett was instrumental in the decision to select Michael Graves as the architect of the Carlos Museum. In recognition of his contributions there, including serving as curator for a number of exhibitions of works on paper, a gallery in the museum is named in his honor, as is the newly established John Howett Works on Paper Fund. Howett has also been awarded the Woolford B. Baker Award for service to the museum and the arts at Emory.

When Howett arrived in Atlanta in the sixties, the civil rights movement was at its height, and he became active in antiwar and social-justice efforts. He was an ardent supporter of the arts community in the city, serving on the boards of the Atlanta College of Art, Art Papers, the Arts Festival of Atlanta, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgia. A board member of the High Museum of Art for two decades, he helped in the choice of Richard Meier as architect of its new building completed in 1983. The many exhibitions for which he served as curator—at the High, the Carlos, and galleries in Atlanta—included contemporary art as well as Renaissance and Baroque illuminations, prints, and drawings. His championing of Atlanta artists in exhibitions and publications aided many careers and contributed to the burgeoning arts community.

Howett was a model of the publicly engaged academic: kind, humorous, wise, and spirited in navigating the shoals of university politics and bureaucracy and bridging the gap between academia and the broader community.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu works in the Department of Art, Music, and Design at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and June Hargrove teaches nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Hans A. Lüthy

With the death of Hans A. Lüthy, on March 8, 2009, art history has lost a scholar and a leader, a catalyst whose vision and philanthropy contributed to the growth of the discipline in Europe and America.

Born in 1932, Lüthy studied art history in Zurich, where he wrote a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Swiss landscape painter Johann Jakob Ulrich II (1965). In 1963, he was appointed director of the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft (SIK), or Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zürich, a position that he would hold for more than thirty years. Founded in 1951, the SIK became a major research institute under his directorship, the influence of which was felt both at home and abroad. Lüthy, indeed, pursued a two-pronged agenda: one, to research Switzerland’s artistic patrimony and to disseminate that research through exhibitions and publications; and, two, to promote Swiss art abroad, particularly in the United States. He was responsible for the organization of several exhibitions of Swiss art in the US, including From Liotard to Le Corbusier: 200 Years of Swiss Painting, 1730–1930 in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and monographic exhibitions of the works of Ferdinand Hodler. His energy and commitment brought a new dimension to the awareness of Swiss art here.

Lüthy’s scholarly pursuits were focused on nineteenth-century French art, and he maintained an active publishing career, which included numerous articles for the press, notably the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Since his retirement in 1994, Lüthy remained actively involved in art history. Through a private foundation, he and his wife, Marianne (Mascha), funded several research and writing projects. One of these was Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which would not have come into being if not for his generous start-up grant. For this, the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art owes him a debt of gratitude. The couple also contributed a scholarship to the Centre allemande d’histoire de l’art (Deutsche Forum für Kunstgeschichte) in Paris.

At the same time, he began to collect art. As a collector his taste tended to French neoclassical and Romantic drawings, a predilection that was no doubt related to his life-long interest in the work of Théodore Géricault. He also assembled a small but significant collection of sculpture of the same period. A selection of drawings and sculpture from his collection was exhibited in 2002 in the Kunstmuseum in Bern, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

During the past few years, Lüthy’s ill health prevented him from staying in touch with many former friends and acquaintances. Those who knew him, and I am sure there are many of us in the US, remember him fondly for his genuine kindness, his enthusiasm, and his generosity of spirit. He was a raconteur and bon vivant whose presence enlivened many an occasion, scholarly and otherwise. He will be much missed.

Linda Downs is CAA executive director.

Until her death on December 10, 2008, at age 95, Mildred “Connie” Cohen Constantine Bettelheim was the oldest College Art Association member and the oldest CAA employee. At the age of sixteen, she was hired by Audrey McMahon, corresponding secretary at CAA, in 1929 as a stenographer when the CAA offices were located at 220 West Fifty-eighth Street. She kept up the list of New York exhibitions for Parnassus (the precursor of Art Journal), eventually editing articles, assisting at Annual Conferences, and attending to correspondence.

I interviewed Connie last May in her art-filled home in Nyack, New York. She talked about the seminal experience that CAA’s employment and subsequent membership meant to her in her professional life. It opened up the creative and intellectual world to her at a time when CAA was in its formative years, and she was able to contribute to its development. Through her position at CAA she came in contact with artists like David Smith (when he applied for Works Progress Administration status through CAA; they immediately became life-long friends) and with art historians and future museum directors such as Francis Henry Taylor.

CAA also taught her the realities of the art world, from organizing demonstrations in support of artists’ rights to being requested to change her name. A prominent CAA member lobbied the Board of Directors to protest the appearance of a Jewish name on CAA correspondence. So Connie, as she was known by her friends, found a new name that she liked and permanently changed her last name from Cohen to Constantine.

She worked at CAA until 1937, when she returned to college to earn her BA and MA at New York University and attend graduate school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1940 Constantine worked at the Office of Inter-American Affairs at the Library of Congress, and in 1948 was hired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Department. She became an associate curator and curatorial consultant at MoMA through 1970, where she pioneered an interest in art outside the mainstream, from posters to graphic design. Constantine wrote over a dozen books and exhibition catalogues, including Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (1975), Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters (1974) with Alan Fern, and Whole Cloth (1997) with Laurel Reuter. She also became an expert on fiber arts, coauthoring Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (1973) with the fiber artist Jack Lenor Larson. At her death, she was researching for a major international study of thread.

Constantine was both a great supporter and a great critic of CAA. She was a lifetime member and enjoyed the articles in The Art Bulletin, but believed that Art Journal was too limited in scope and did not fully address contemporary international art, as it once did. She also wanted to see a greater focus on international artists at Annual Conferences.

I first met Connie in 1980 when we were organizing a Diego Rivera retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Because of her familiarity with Mexican collections and because of her research and book on Tina Modotti, she was recommended to me by Alan Fern, who was then director of the National Portrait Gallery, for the photography section of the larger exhibition. Over several years we worked together as she curated one of the most important collections of photographs that captured the life of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo by artists such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, and Tina Modotti. She was an intrepid curator with a wonderful eye for quality and for the quirky.

Connie’s pioneering work and gregarious personality touched the lives of so many artists, art historians, curators, and collectors. She helped to shape the College Art Association in its first few decades and forged a path that has been followed by many subsequent students of art and art history.