CAA News Today

Insightful studies that reframe a Raphael fresco, Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, and Kano Hōgai’s best-known work are among the six essays in the December 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. The issue has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The final issue of the year comprises six essays, two of which delve into art from the Italian peninsula. In “Reflections of Imperialism,” Brenda Longfellow examines the Meta Sudans fountain in Rome, built during the Flavian dynasty, as a signifier of imperial legacy in both Rome and its provinces. For her contribution, Patricia Reilly contends that Raphael’s often-maligned Fire in the Borgo presents the artist’s argument for a new theory of painting. Looking across the Atlantic, Angélica Afandor-Pujol studies the illustrated manuscript known as the “Relación de Michoancán” and investigates issues of mimicry and the appropriation of European artistic traditions by indigenous artists in colonial Mexico.

Moving to the modern times, Chelsea Foxwell reconsiders the iconographic and historical significance of Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon (1888), a masterpiece of Japanese painting, and Tom Folland argues that Rauschenberg’s Combines represent a queering of Abstract Expressionism and, by extension, the culture of postwar modernism. In “The State of Art History,” Terry Smith explores ideas of the contemporary within discourse on modern art and proposes a framework for globally considering the art of today.

In the Reviews section, Gabriela Siracusano assesses Veiled Brightness, a multiauthored book on the history of Maya color. Charles Darwin’s relationship to the visual arts is the focus of Rachael Delue four-book analysis, and Erika Naginski reviews The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next issue, to be published in March 2011, will feature essays on the Bocca della Verità in Rome; the “finger-bone” relics of a Buddha found in Shaanxi Province, China; and relationships between German painting and Czech Cubism.

The September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The issue interweaves three essays that focus on art and visual culture in Europe with three texts exploring works from the Americas. On the Continent, Molly Swetnam-Burland looks at issues of reuse, display, and cross-cultural appropriation through the history of the obelisk in the Piazza Montecitorio in Rome. For his essay “Material Futures,” Richard Taws views Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s print Almanach national (1790) as articulating relations between the materiality expressed in the image and changing conceptions of time in the French Revolution. In his contribution, Darius A. Spieth investigates the “politics of nostalgia” in modern Italian culture through the reception history of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco Il Mondo Nuovo (1791).

Across the Atlantic, “Circles of Creation” is Amara L. Solari’s exploration of how the Maya in early colonial Yucatán invented their own cartographic tradition that allowed for the preservation of community identity during the chaos of colonization. In “Rioting Refigured,” Ross Barrett examines the way in which George Henry Hall’s painting A Dead Rabbit (1858) reframes a mid-nineteenth-century rioter in New York City as an ideal nude, both tempering and exacerbating connotations of violence. Moving into the twentieth century, Ken Allen argues that Ed Ruscha’s experimentations with size and scale in his images of 1960s Los Angeles gave viewers a new experiential understanding of the city.

The reviews section presents four books on diverse topics. Timon Screech evaluates Melissa McCormick’s study of an early member of the Tosa School in Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan, and Charles Dempsey examines Stuart Lingo’s book on Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and Enlightenment, which looks at how historical forces and philosophical debated affected public funerary monuments in eighteenth-century France, is reviewed by Satish Padiyar. Finally, Karen Beckman considers Flesh of My Flesh, the latest book by the film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The final Art Bulletin for 2010 will be published in December.