American Art History Research Articles

John Coltrane’s Pursuit of Elegance

This essay presents John Coltrane as a key transitional figure in the history of African American art’s relationship with the cultural mainstream, bridging the institutionalized cultural movements of the earlier part of the century, such as the Harlem Renaissance, and the more politically and formally radical ones—such as the Black Arts Movement—that succeeded them in the 1960s. The larger cultural transition that Coltrane both responded to and participated in can be traced through the seemingly contradictory ideas about the value of conventional aesthetic form expressed in his published writings—which include poetry, autobiography, statements of artistic purpose, and private correspondence—as well as in his interviews and major musical undertakings, such as his popular album A Love Supreme . Reading these documents in light of the cultural environment in which Coltrane received his early education can help uncover aspects of the role he played in mediating the institutionalized and mainstream-oriented aesthetic values in which he was raised for the artists and authors on whom he had such a singular influence in the 1960s.

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’

Sturtevant: double trouble

Known for her early repetitions of the work of her contemporaries including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol Sturtevant turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, using Duchamps model of the readymade to probe uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet the aspect of her work that allowed her to be described as the one artist who cant be copied her chameleon - like embrace of other artists art is also what has allowed her to be largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of mid-century modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures. Despite a rising reputation in Europe, Sturtevant is still largely unknown in her home country. Published to accompany the first retrospective of her work in a US museum since 1973, at The Museum of Modern Art, this publication considers Sturtevant as a uniquely American artist, with political concerns inflected specifically by her upbringing and adult life in the US. Featuring previously unpublished drawings and sketches from the artists archive, the book includes an essay by the exhibition curator that provides a comprehensive overview of the artists practice while situating it more concretely within American culture.

Unsettled borders and memories: a “local” indigenous perspective on contemporary globalization

This article provides a case study of decolonial counter-memory in contemporary indigenous artist Alan Michelson's 2009 Third Bank of the River. Installed inside the lobby of the tri-national border station between the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Canada, and the United States—the most legally disputed territory in North America—Michelson's artwork recovers the seventeenth-century Two Row wampum belt as model for reforming relationships at the border. This wampum belt memorializes a commitment between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers to co-exist in balanced interdependence and remains a key touchstone in indigenous political philosophy and activism. Interpreted in the post-9/11 build-up of state power at the disputed border zone, Third Bank proposes a model of international dialogue and nation-to-nation diplomacy that contrasts with the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism. It thus stands out as an important indigenous perspective on the widespread interest in memory in global contemporary art, in which artists are recovering a new viewpoint on contemporaneity through the reconceptualization of historical pasts.Mark Watson is an assistant professor of Art History at Clayton State University in Atlanta. He received his PhD in modern American art history from Columbia University in New York in 2012. His research interests include contemporary art and theory, modern American art, Native North American art, and the relationship of art to countercultural social movements. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art, Art History, Third Text, and the edited volume, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (University of Minnesota, 2011).

Book review: Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, written by Steve Edwards

Steve Edwards’s book, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, is a close study of Rosler’s 1976 artwork. The book takes up the social and political coordinates of the work’s production, focusing on the San Diego Group of which Rosler was a member, New York City during the fiscal crisis, and the broader contribution Rosler makes to what Edwards calls ‘second-wave political modernism’. This review considers Edwards’s analyses of the work, and locates its importance within the discussion around Rosler, as well as the broader history of radical American art.

Reflections on John Outterbridge

This essay offers a detailed overview of the life and work of Californian artist John Outterbridge. It chronicles the early influences on the development of his work and unique style and brings up to date his accomplishments as an artist that deserves many more accolades. The reigniting of his career via the group exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 has provided an opportunity to begin the writing of American art history through an inclusive lens.

Relics and Erotics: Cuban Art after the Revolution

Relics and Erotics:Cuban Art after the Revolution Abigail McEwen Rolando Pérez. Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2012. 318 pp. Rachel Weiss. To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 322 pp. Tropes of both the “Baroque” and the “utopian” have long persisted in readings of twentieth-century Latin American art and literature. Two new books, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts by Rolando Pérez and To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art by Rachel Weiss, draw upon these interpretive metaphors in considering aspects of Cuban visual culture in the decades following the Revolution. Their subjects are separated by time and space: Sarduy left Cuba in 1960, remaining in exile for the duration of his life, and Weiss’s narrative unfolds almost exclusively in Havana during the 1980s and 1990s. Yet their exegeses of opposing impulses—toward the imperfect (likely from the Portuguese barroco, or “rough pearl”), on the one hand, and on the other toward the impossible ideal—speak analogously to the historical conditions that have shaped the past half-century of Cuban arts and letters. These books contribute to a body of scholarship around contemporary Cuban art that has swelled in recent years, sparked by reconsiderations of post-Revolutionary culture at large and, with respect to the visual arts, seemingly insatiable market interest. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera’s recent book, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora (2011), describes the connective tissue between Weiss and Pérez’s contributions, chronicling the amorphous landscape of Cuban art in exile. Lynette M.F. Bosch, in Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque (2004), focused on a very specific Cuban community (her Neo-Baroque does not engage Sarduy’s). Luis Camnitzer (New Art of Cuba [rev. ed., 2003]) and Holly Block (Art Cuba: The New Generation [2001]) provided authoritative, early accounts of the “New Cuban Art,” defining the movement in generational and historical terms and relating key documentary and encyclopedic information. A holistic history of contemporary Cuban art, one attempting to [End Page 109] relate work by artists who stayed on the island and those who left, remains to be written. Despite the proliferation of these targeted histories and of monographic studies, Cuba and the Caribbean tend to be dissociated from surveys of contemporary Latin American art. Differences in postwar developments need not preclude conceptual homologies, however, and hemispheric constructions of the Baroque and the utopian may yet prove instructive in this regard. Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor thoughtfully engaged the leitmotif of the Baroque in their exhibition, Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2000), although they referenced Cuba at only a theoretical level. By and large, scholars in literary fields have taken the lead in considering these aesthetic questions in relation to hemispheric topoi. Recently published books by Lois Parkinson Zamora (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction [2006]) and Monika Kaup (Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film [2012]) are particularly notable; Rafael Rojas (Las repúblicas de aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica [2009]) and Antoni Kapcia (Cuba: Island of Dreams [2000]), among others, have critically explored utopian discourse. The recuperation of Sarduy as a bridge figure between literature and aesthetics may serve not only to better illuminate his own work, as Pérez’s book begins to do, but also to more fully integrate the Cuban philosophical tradition within the fields of Latin American art history and criticism. Read together, these books by Pérez and Weiss offer new meditations on the conjunction between Baroque and utopian praxis in post-Revolutionary Cuban visual culture. They manifest two discrete approaches to the field—academic monograph; eyewitness historical survey—and yet each seeks in a basic way to excavate an ideational provenance for creative work across Cuba’s cultural field. Before further consideration of common interests, each book is here discussed separately and within the scope of its given intentions. Reimagining the Neobaroque Body A...

Jack Smith, H�lio Oiticica, Tropicalism

Jack Smith, Hélio Oiticica, Tropicalism Juan A. Suárez (bio) At this point, we have a number of Jack Smiths to choose from or combine. We have the queer Smith, anti-oedipal creature of indefiniteness and ambiguity who crossed genders and sexualities, advocated brassieres as storage devices—much better than pockets, he claimed—and never-theless moaned, at the end of his life, that he had been taken too literally: “What did I foster? An industry of drag queens. I’m ashamed of it.”1 We have the socialist Smith, rabid denouncer of a rented world. We have the anarchist Smith, who fulminated against all forms of imposed order. We have the anti-art Smith, who culled his materials from the streets, put on shows in his living quarters, saw his entire life as an endless performance, and shirked the established art world and the state’s cultural apparatus. And, in this essay, I turn my attention to a Smith that I don’t think we have fully realized yet: a tropicalist Smith, fascinated consumer, deployer, and subverter of Latin exotica. As I do this, I want to cross Smith’s tropicalism with that of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who inadvertently gave the term a new currency in 1967, when his art started incorporating and questioning tropical stereotypes, and whose extraordinary work has numerous points of convergence with Smith’s. Part of my point in staging this dialogue is to connect the New York underground cinema with contemporary Latin American art and cultural history. The link has seldom been made yet deserves consideration in light of the currents of influence circulating between the North and South American avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s. During these years—and subsequently—numerous Latin American artists (including Oiticica) converged in New York, where they showed their work and at times entered the orbit of the film underground. Simultaneously, the New York underground—more often read and talked about than directly experienced—influenced various Latin American cinematic vanguards, such as 8-mm filmmaking in Mexico City and the Brazilian underground [End Page 295] of the late 1960s onward. Artists in both hemispheres were coping with similar issues at the time—the role of the photochemical media in the redefinition of art, the pervasiveness of mass culture, and the relation of art to power, hegemony, and marginality. Oiticica and Smith radically redefined their various media and enlisted the energies of popular culture in the process, purveyed provocative conceptions of the nature and use of art, and denounced the oppressiveness of their respective societies while trying to reinvent the modern everyday. The trans-American perspective on their work is further warranted by the inverted symmetry of their engagements. Smith used Latin kitsch—as it was served by the commercial films of the 1940s—to infuse the contemporary American underground with queer affect and ethnic reference in the creation of what Oiticica once called “Tropicamp.”2 For his part, Oiticica drew on rock, drugs, and American experimental culture to combine localism and internationalism, as well as popular appeal and avant-garde experimentation. Oiticica sustained an intense dialogue with contemporary American experimental and popular culture, which he integrated, especially during his New York residency in the 1970s, into his explorations of “Brazilian” visual and aural motifs and into his long-standing examination of color, perception, and the objecthood of the artwork. During this period, he developed an extraordinary form of expanded cinema that he called “quasi-cinema” and was partly influenced by Smith. A more anecdotal lead into my topic is in a letter from Oiticica to his friend, the great Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, then living in Paris, dated 14 May 1971, seven months after his arrival in New York. He starts out reporting on the excitement of the city, the state of his loft, and, inevitably, on the stream of frightening news from Brazil: his friend Nando (Fernando Romero?) had just been imprisoned for an incriminating Super-8 film whose content Oiticica does not specify; another friend, designer Rogério Duarte, had a psychotic break, set himself on fire, and was temporarily in an asylum; and many others were under home arrest, in hiding...

Beyond Claims of Truth

Pursuing the truth, the virtue and the beauty is the supreme realm of art, and it has become a general concept deeply rooted in our mind. However, is the truth that art pursues a fact that is faithful to actuality, a reality that is existent, or a truth that is logical and thus widely accepted by the general public? Heidegger, a German philosopher, intended to examine the truth of art through “A pair of Shoes”, a master piece of Van Gogh, in his paper “The Origin of Work of Art”. Nevertheless, Heidegger's point was challenged by an American art historian --Schapiro. Schapiro criticized that Heidegger had misjudged a pair of Van Gogh's own shoes as a peasant woman’s. Schapiro's criticism drew French philosopher Derrida into the debate. In his article “ The Truth in Painting”, Derrida presented his layer-by-layer deconstruction of Heidegger's and Schapiro's blind pots in their argumentation on the truth of art, using his renowned technique for word games; at the same time, his thinking mode became instantly a target for deconstruction when he tried to turn the tangled concepts into clear distinct words. In this article, we aim to explore statements regarding the “truth” of art in aesthetics theories through the debates among Schapiro, Heidegger and Derrida. We wish to seek a new position for “truth” in art and investigate its significance to art, especially to visual art.

Jack Smith, Hélio Oiticica, Tropicalism

At this point, we have a number of Jack Smiths to choose from or combine. We have the queer Smith, anti-oedipal creature of indefiniteness and ambiguity who crossed genders and sexualities, advocated brassieres as storage devices-much better than pockets, he claimed-and nevertheless moaned, at the end of his life, that he had been taken too literally: What did I foster? An industry of drag queens. I'm ashamed of it.1 We have the socialist Smith, rabid denouncer of a rented world. We have the anarchist Smith, who fulminated against all forms of imposed order. We have the anti-art Smith, who culled his materials from the streets, put on shows in his living quarters, saw his entire life as an endless performance, and shirked the established art world and the state's cultural apparatus. And, in this essay, I turn my attention to a Smith that I don't think we have fully realized yet: a tropicalist Smith, fascinated consumer, deployer, and subverter of Latin exotica. As I do this, I want to cross Smith's tropicalism with that of artist Helio Oiticica, who inadvertently gave the term a new currency in 1967, when his art started incorporating and questioning tropical stereotypes, and whose extraordinary work has numerous points of convergence with Smith's.Part of my point in staging this dialogue is to connect the New York underground cinema with contemporary Latin American art and cultural history. The link has seldom been made yet deserves consideration in light of the currents of influence circulating between the North and South American avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s. During these years-and subsequently-numerous Latin American artists (including Oiticica) converged in New York, where they showed their work and at times entered the orbit of the film underground. Simultaneously, the New York underground-more often read and talked about than directly experienced-influenced various Latin American cinematic vanguards, such as 8-mm filmmaking in Mexico City and the underground of the late 1960s onward. Artists in both hemispheres were coping with similar issues at the time-the role of the photochemical media in the redefinition of art, the pervasiveness of mass culture, and the relation of art to power, hegemony, and marginality. Oiticica and Smith radically redefined their various media and enlisted the energies of popular culture in the process, purveyed provocative conceptions of the nature and use of art, and denounced the oppressiveness of their respective societies while trying to reinvent the modern everyday. The trans-American perspective on their work is further warranted by the inverted symmetry of their engagements. Smith used Latin kitsch-as it was served by the commercial films of the 1940s-to infuse the contemporary American underground with queer affect and ethnic reference in the creation of what Oiticica once called Tropicamp.2 For his part, Oiticica drew on rock, drugs, and American experimental culture to combine localism and internationalism, as well as popular appeal and avant-garde experimentation. Oiticica sustained an intense dialogue with contemporary American experimental and popular culture, which he integrated, especially during his New York residency in the 1970s, into his explorations of Brazilian visual and aural motifs and into his long-standing examination of color, perception, and the objecthood of the artwork. During this period, he developed an extraordinary form of expanded cinema that he called quasi-cinema and was partly influenced by Smith.A more anecdotal lead into my topic is in a letter from Oiticica to his friend, the great artist Lygia Clark, then living in Paris, dated 14 May 1971, seven months after his arrival in New York. He starts out reporting on the excitement of the city, the state of his loft, and, inevitably, on the stream of frightening news from Brazil: his friend Nando (Fernando Romero?) had just been imprisoned for an incriminating Super-8 film whose content Oiticica does not specify; another friend, designer Rogerio Duarte, had a psychotic break, set himself on fire, and was temporarily in an asylum; and many others were under home arrest, in hiding, or in and out of jail at the whim of the police. …

Joseph Cornell’s Subversive Materialism

Joseph Cornell’s box assemblages have proven difficult for art historians and gallerists to categorize. Being neither painting, sculpture, nor precisely collage, their unique position within the history of twentieth-century American art highlights the disruptive materialist strategies the artist employed in forming his objects in the 1940s. This article discusses three related strategies derived from material culture that the assemblages subvert by deviating from the established pathways of particular object categories: the inauthentic object, the souvenir, and the biographical object. These related strategies helped the artist to negotiate his relationship with the city of New York and its immersive consumer culture, and mediate the anxieties recalled in his diaries regarding eternity and the infinite expanse of space. Finally, the article contends that these deviations represent the source of the works’ spiritual and social resonance.

Modern nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George

Although OKeeffe is usually associated with the desert landscape of New Mexico, her professional development as an artist largely occurred during the years she summered at Alfred Stieglitz's family estate at Lake George, in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. Modern Nature, the first book to examine OKeeffe's time at Lake George in detail, looks behind the public facade OKeeffe created for herself in her later career, revealing a surprisingly different portrait of this widely mythologized artist. More than sixty colour plates reflect the extraordinary body of work created by OKeeffe at Lake George, and are accompanied by rarely seen photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and members of his circle. Published to accompany an exhibition originating at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in Georgia OKeeffe and the history of American art.

A. B. Jackson and the ‘black art’ paradigm

Abstract This brief biography introduces the life of American painter Alexander Brooks ‘A. B.’ Jackson (1925–1981) and seeks to better establish his place in the annals of American Art and Education history. A student of renowned colour field painter Josef Albers at Yale, and the first black professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, Jackson represents a connection between the teaching methods of Germany’s Bauhaus design school and the politics and aesthetics of segregation in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Art by African American artists of Jackson’s generation is often examined either in terms of a radicalized political stance, or in the context of abstract expressionism – often linked to the self-described (or presumed) rhythm and attitudes of African American identity. Jackson’s work and professional identity did not adhere to the trends spurred by the nation’s heated racial tensions, and therefore defies current educational and aesthetic categorization. A deeper understanding of Jackson’s experience, methods as an artist, and greater body of work are sought through interviews, archival research, and an examination of why his presence amongst the greater perception of ‘black art’ is largely omitted from scholarly resources.

Navigating the Worldly and the Divine: Jewish American Artists on Judaism and their Art

The history of American art boasts a large number of prominent artists with Jewish backgrounds, including artists as diverse as Richard Avedon, Audrey Flack, Robert Frank, and Lee Krasner. Whether or not these artists’ religiocultural inheritance influence(d) their art has been of recent interest. This article presents some Jewish American artists’ own thoughts on the Jewishness of their art or the spiritual dimensions that shape their artistic conceptions. Several rich sources have supplied this important primary material, including the artists’ personal writings, notably an impressive body of autobiographical books and comments, and the author’s oral interviews and written correspondence with many of the living artists. By offering some Jewish American artists’ perceptions of their background and work, not only can we see the diversity of the artists’ Jewish identifications but these new perspectives will invigorate subsequent discussions of both their Jewish and non-Jewish themed work.

Academic Adventures in China

I am a professor of literature and at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and before 2008 I had never been to China. Quite by chance, I found myself invited, through the good offices of a Chinese academic working in Glasgow in the field of literature and religion, to speak at a summer conference in Wenzhou, and from there was invited to take up a Changjiang Chair for three years at Renmin University of China in Beijing, teaching courses to undergraduates and postgraduates in English literature and hermeneutics, that is, the theory of interpretation. For two months each year since then, that is what I have done to the best of my ability. Allow me, then, to begin this brief essay with some very broad reflections on exchanges between cultures and the nature of literature as these have been guided by this experience. Understanding next to no Mandarin I have got by through the generosity of Chinese people in the university speaking with me in English, and occasionally French, ever more convinced of two truths as they impress themselves upon me. First, that there is a universal language in literature and that is as true in the exchanges between Chinese and English literature as it is in those between ancient Greek literature and English. Across the boundaries of ages and cultures, poets and writers speak to one another with a grace forbidden to philosophers or theologians. I have found a certain familiarity in the midst of strangeness in even the most ancient of Chinese texts in often rather stilted translations. Before I properly begin it may be useful to refer to the current discussions in the field of art history amongst scholars such as James Elkins and James Cahill on the 'globalizing of art history'. Elkins, a distinguished American art historian, has written on Chinese landscape painting despite, like myself, having little Chinese and in full awareness of his alien epistemological and hermeneutical structures as a critic. Cahill has written of the Chinese emphasis in art criticism on the 'verbal' while the Western is on the 'visual'. In short, there is no escaping our built-in cultural biases and the fact that we perceive as outsiders to another culture. Nevertheless, we ought not abandon the task of such intercultural critical enterprises, provided we are aware of the complexities and hermeneutical implications of our increasingly 'globalized' activities as critics--whether in art history, literature, or, indeed, religion. And so I return to my own literary field of study. Now it is the case that, in some respects as readers of any texts, even those within our own tradition, we are always trespassing in unknown territory; George Steiner pointed this out long ago, remarking that a contemporary English reader of Daniel Defoe's eighteenth-century prose is immediately in a very strange country, its contours and language somewhat recognizable as 'English', but often barely so. (1) But, still, whether I read a classic Chinese work like A Dream of Red Mansions (in translation) or Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged (by a modern Chinese writer partly educated at Oxford and Paris), to a degree I know where I am, and what comes into critical operation is a hermeneutical machinery that at the very least provides a space across the text for conversation and comparison in a way that other forms of study within the fields of the Humanities--religion, for example-very largely fail to do. There you almost have to start each time from scratch and translation is virtually impossible as any Christian theologian who tries to read the Tao Te Ching quickly discovers. (Reading it as poetry is another matter.) At one level the Tao seems to the Western theological reader to be somehow familiar, another example of a kind of negative theology with a relationship to the Pseudo-Dionysius and others, but then you find that there are just no words in English to translate its key terms. The religious vocabulary simply does not exist, and so, like James Legge and others before us in the West, we have to use words from our own tradition in our attempts at translation--most famously Logos for Tao--knowing that they are wrong. …

Artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

For over a decade, conceptual and performance art has been dominated by participatory art. Its champions, such as French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (who invented the term relational aesthetics to describe it) and American art historian Grant Kester, believe that by encouraging an audience to join in, the artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art. The book follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of the participatory aesthetic, in both Europe and America. This itinerary takes in Futurism, Dada, Situationism, Czechoslovakian Happenings, and Argentinean Conceptualism, and concludes with contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera and Jeremy Deller. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to expose the political and aesthetic limitations of this work. In Artificial Hells she not only scrutinizes the claims for democracy and emancipation that the artists and critics make for the work, but also questions the turn to ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such participatory and collaborative art.

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

“We Can Make It Come True”: Faith Ringgold's Dinner at Gertrude Stein's

Research Article| March 01 2013 “We Can Make It Come True”: Faith Ringgold's Dinner at Gertrude Stein's Tirza True Latimer Tirza True Latimer California College of the Arts tlatimer@cca.edu Tirza True Latimer is associate professor and chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her published work reflects on modern and contemporary visual culture from a lesbian feminist perspective. She is co-editor, with Whitney Chadwick, of the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2003) and the author of Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She co-organized, with the art historian Wanda Corn, the 2011-2012 exhibition, “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories,” hosted by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; a co-authored book, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (University of California Press, 2011), accompanied the exhibition. In 2013, Latimer received a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a related research project, provisionally titled “Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Language Notes (2013) 51 (1): 129–135. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.1.129 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tirza True Latimer; “We Can Make It Come True”: Faith Ringgold's Dinner at Gertrude Stein's. English Language Notes 1 March 2013; 51 (1): 129–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.1.129 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEnglish Language Notes Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2013 Regents of the University of Colorado2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: II. Mechanical Reproductions You do not currently have access to this content.

Did Menzel Paint His Own Babinski Sign?

Adolph von Menzel (1815–1905), one of the greatest German realistic painters of the nineteenth Century (1), painted his right foot from normal perspective with the great toe extended (Figure ​(Figure1B).1B). The other toes seem to be relaxed. There are no suggestions of foot deformity like pes cavus. Figure 1 (A) A foot of a proband – a Babinski sign or a voluntary extension of a great toe? (A solution is found in the Supplementary material). (B) “The painter’s Foot” by Adolph von Menzel (1815–1905) (National Gallery ... Menzel finished that painting, oil on wood panel, in 1876 (1). He gave no official explanation, why he had chosen this motif. A son of his friend remembered that Menzel once, while taking a foot bath, suddenly looked at his feet and started to draw his own foot (2). He did it so intensively, that for a while he completely forgot about washing his feet (2). Fried Michael, an American art critic and art historian, viewed the picture “The painter’s Foot” principally in its immense vitality (1). He assumed the odd extension of a great toe to be an imaginary manifestation of the body’s liveliness (1). Consequently, he believed, that the painter kept his great toe voluntarily extended as long and often as needed to finish that painting (1). For a neurologist it is impossible to view that picture without thinking about the Babinski sign. The question – did Menzel paint, what he saw per se or did he paint, what he modeled just to make the picture dynamic – is asked more than a 100 years too late to be unambiguously answered by Menzel himself. Menzel’s life and especially his work showed, that he was an outstanding observer and determined realist (1, 3). Being such a person, would he paint, what he did not see? In all probability not. He drew his hand as well and by doing this, he did not experiment with various finger positions (1). He just painted his hand in one of several normal postures. If we therefore assume, that great toe extension, seen in his picture “The painter’s Foot” (Figure ​(Figure1B)1B) actually exhibits a reflex, i.e., the Babinski sign (4), we have to confront ourselves with another question. Did Menzel, a highly talented man, mentally and physically active almost to his death at the age of 89 years, i.e., in 1905 (1–3), have a neurological disorder at least from his early sixties on? Considering his successful life, which was extraordinarily long for his time (1, 3), it seems implausible, that he would have had a significant neurological disorder. However, his medical case history was not completely irrelevant. Growing to a height of about 1.40 m (3), he was rather small in stature, but his parents and siblings were of normal height (3). As a child and also later he suffered from some kind of seizures (2, 3). According to scarce descriptions of these (2), it is to be supposed, that they were epileptic. They happened suddenly and assumingly without prodromes (2). Anyway, this disorder did not considerably restrict him when painting, even though for years he did not have an especially healthy lifestyle. He tended to work almost the whole day without resting or eating (2). Then late in the evening he would go to a pub and enjoyed a great meal (2). There is no indication, that he took any medicine regularly or that he ever injured himself because of a seizure (1–3). He did not smoke, but he did enjoy drinking wine (without being an alcoholic) (2). Interestingly, by painting he was able to use both his hands equally (3). As a matter of fact he started to paint with his left-hand, but over the course of time he learned to paint with his right hand (3). Taking into account Menzel’s immense work – the best reflection of himself – and all the written memories of him, we can conclude, that Menzel quite likely painted, what he simply saw, i.e., his own Babinski sign and not a foot with one of many possible voluntary movements of a great toe (Figure ​(Figure1B).1B). Maybe water stimulated the sole of his foot while he was taking a foot bath and thus elicited the Babinski sign. However, Menzel had to notice instinctively the distinctiveness of the great toe extension. Why should he, one of the most prominent German artists of the nineteenth century, and very successful as well (1, 3), otherwise portray it?

Art, Architecture, and Religious Orders in the Latin Americas: From Quebec to Quito

Art, Architecture, and Religious Orders in the Latin AmericasFrom Quebec to Quito Gauvin Alexander Bailey (bio) Painting of the Kingdoms: Shared Identities; Territories of the Spanish Monarchy, 16th–18th centuries. 4 volumes. Edited by Juana Gutiérrez Haces; introduction by Jonathan Brown. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2008–2009. Pp. xlviii + 1503. $400.00 cloth. ISBN: 9786077612063. Les arts en Nouvelle-France. Edited by Laurier Lacroix. Quebec City: Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, 2012. Pp. 296. $59.95 paper. ISBN: 9782551252114. Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika: Ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch. Band II: Chile (1618–1771). Edited by Johannes Meier and Michael Müller. Münster: Aschendorff, 2011. Pp. 1 + 458. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9783402117897. Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika: Ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch. Band III: Neugranada (1618–1771). Edited by Johannes Meier and Christoph Nebgen. Münster: Aschendorff, 2008. Pp. xxxvi + 244. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9783402117880. The Art of Painting in Colonial Quito / El arte de la pintura en Quito colonial. Edited by Susanne L. Stratton-Pruitt. Philadelphia: St Joseph’s University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 337. $75.00 cloth. ISBN: 978091601695. Imágenes guaraní-jesuíticas: Paraguay, Argentina, Brasil. By Bozidar Darko Sustersic. Asunción, Paraguay: Centro de Artes Visuales / Museo del Barro, 2010. Pp. 421. ISBN: 9789995386948. Quito, ciudad de maestros: Arquitectos, edificios y urbanismo en el largo siglo XVII. By Susan V. Webster. Quito: Abya-Yala, 2012. Pp. viii + 298. $40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9789942090706. [End Page 181] The past four years have witnessed a sea change in the scholarship on viceregal Iberian American art history as well as that of the other Latin America, Nouvelle-France. Although the literature on Iberian America continues to focus mainly on the traditional New Spain/Cuzco/Lima corridor, new monographs on the arts of Quito (two in 2012 alone, The Art of Painting in Colonial Quito; and Quito, ciudad de maestros) and Paraguay (Imágenes guaraní-jesuíticas, 2010), as well as superlative archival studies of the impact of non-Spanish Jesuit priests and brothers—many of them craftsmen and architects—on Nueva Granada and Chile (Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika, volumes 2 and 3, 2011Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika, volumes 2 and 3, 2008) are demanding that scholars no longer treat those regions as marginal to the field. Likewise, a major four-volume compendium of the painting of the Spanish Empire (Painting of the Kingdoms, 2008) has focused new attention on transatlantic themes, looking at artistic interaction within the entire Spanish Empire, including the Americas, Flanders, Portugal (under the Spanish monarchy between 1580 and 1640), and Southern Italy, although regrettably neglecting the Philippines. Similarly, colonial Québécois art history, hitherto virtually unknown outside the province and subject primarily to survey treatments, now takes its place on the hemispheric stage with a thematic, intelligent, and visually rich exhibition and companion volume from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quebec City (Les arts en Nouvelle-France, 2012) that compels us to acknowledge the commonalities of the arts and visual culture of this region and those of its Catholic counterparts to the south. Although wide ranging, the volumes of Painting of the Kingdoms—published in advance of a blockbuster exhibition at the Prado and Palacio Nacional in Madrid (2010–2011)—fall short of being encyclopaedic, since the project limits itself primarily to pre–Bourbon era painting and concentrates on Europe, Mexico, and Peru despite brief forays into Brazil, Quito, and Nueva Granada. Its main theme, that the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church were “agents of unity” (25) in the Americas, risks turning into a celebration of European sovereignty, but enough of the chapters focus on regional variations that it avoids falling into that trap. Each volume takes a different theme, with some overlap. The first, One King, Many Kingdoms: New Perspectives, considers global interaction and the notion of a new artistic language arising from contact between dialects. The second, The Kingdoms and Painting, features surveys of painting in Spain, Italy, New Spain, Peru, and Luso-Brazil (mostly Portugal) and is useful in illuminating the diversity within these regions. The...