Princeton University Art Museum Research Articles

Exhibition Review: Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures

Exhibition Review: <i>Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures</i>

Raven’s Land: American Literary History In Medias Res

Abstract Known in Western literature for an act of disobedience in Genesis 8.7, the raven became a “type of devil” in eighteenth-century theological writing and a “thing of evil” in Edgar Allan’s Poe’s titular poem. This essay unsettles European labels for the raven through a case study of a Tlingit bentwood box, taken from Alaska in the 1880s and now housed at the Princeton University Art Museum. For over one hundred years, the box has been displaced, but it demands reconsideration through the complexity of the Raven as creator and trickster in Tlingit oral literature. Tlingit raven stories reveal a connection between the European dismissal of the raven as devil and the fabrication of the origins story in American literary history. Highlighting what Western literature ignores in the Genesis story—namely godless authority and a contra-teleological presence, Tlingit and Haida raven stories repudiate the myth of origins on which US settler colonialism depends.

This is not an apple! Benefits and challenges of applying computer vision to museum collections

ABSTRACT The application of computer vision on museum collection data is at an experimental stage with predictions that it will grow in significance and use in the coming years. This research, based on the analysis of five case studies and semi-structured interviews with museum professionals, examined the opportunities and challenges of these technologies, the resources and funding required, and the ethical implications that arise during these initiatives. The case studies examined in this paper are drawn from: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA), Princeton University Art Museum (USA), Museum of Modern Art (USA), Harvard Art Museums (USA), Science Museum Group (UK). The research findings highlight the possibilities of computer vision to offer new ways to analyze, describe and present museum collections. However, their actual implementation on digital products is currently very limited due to the lack of resources and the inaccuracies created by algorithms. This research adds to the rapidly evolving field of computer vision within the museum sector and provides recommendations to operationalize the usage of these technologies, increase the transparency on their application, create ethics playbooks to manage potential bias and collaborate across the museum sector.

African Arts at the Princeton University Art Museum

African Arts at the Princeton University Art Museum

“A Fracture in Time”: A Cup Attributed to the Euaion Painter from the Bothmer Collection

Abstract:In February 2013 Christos Tsirogiannis linked a fragmentary Athenian red-figured cup from the collection formed by Dietrich von Bothmer, former chairman of Greek and Roman Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a tondo in the Villa Giulia, Rome. The Rome fragment was attributed to the Euaion painter. Bothmer had acquired several fragments attributed to this same painter, and some had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Other fragments from this hand were acquired by the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Princeton University Art Museum. In January 2012 it was announced that some fragments from the Bothmer collection would be returned to Italy, because they fitted vases that had already been repatriated from North American collections. The Euaion painter fragments are considered against the phenomenon of collecting and donating fractured pots.

Italian master drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum

This richly illustrated volume offers a new look at the exceptional collection of Italian drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum. An introductory essay by Laura M. Giles chronicles the history and significance of the collection, and nearly one hundred of the collection's masterworks are treated with essay-length entries and full-page images. The first scholarly examination of the collection since Felton Gibbons's comprehensive publication of 1977, the catalogue includes an appendix of more than 150 drawings that have entered the collection since--many previously unpublished, and all fully documented with short entries. Highlights include works by celebrated masters, including Carpaccio and Modigliani, from the early Renaissance through the early Modern periods, with an emphasis on the collection's renowned holdings of works by Luca Cambiaso, Guercino, and the two Tiepolos.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, 14 October 2012–21 January 2013; Princeton Art Museum, 16 February–9 June 2013, Princeton University Art Museum). Catalogue Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe ed. JoaneathSpicer. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012. 144 pp. illus., most colour, 80 thumbnails. $24.95. ISBN 978‐0911886788.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, 14 October 2012–21 January 2013; Princeton Art Museum, 16 February–9 June 2013, Princeton University Art Museum). Catalogue Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe ed. JoaneathSpicer. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012. 144 pp. illus., most colour, 80 thumbnails. $24.95. ISBN 978‐0911886788.

Review: Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art by Slobodan Curčić and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos; with contributions by Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Saradi

Slobodan Curcic and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos; with contributions by Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Saradi. Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art . Princeton and New Haven: Princeton University Art Museum, distributed by Yale University Press, 2010, 376 pp., 185 color and 30 b/w illus. $60 (paper), ISBN 9780300122114 This ambitious catalogue, which accompanied the 2010 show of seventy-six art works at the Princeton University Art Museum, as the flap copy states, seeks to “challenge major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provide new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.”1 To this end, the catalogue’s essay authors are successful in critically reassessing the place of architecture in sacred art. Each asks new questions of how audiences perceived the representations of cityscapes, domed churches, and even Roman-era bathhouses in icon painting, manuscript illumination, and sculpture made for public and private devotion. Rather than dismissing the portrayal of architecture in these contexts as “decorative wallpaper” (3), buildings as depicted in sacred art are interrogated for their critical roles in our understanding of architecture’s perception and representation in the eastern Christian tradition. In contrast to the generally negative assessment of architecture in Byzantine art by Renaissance and later Western European historians, the authors of the catalogue read architectural representations in light of Byzantium’s own aesthetic and cultural traditions. The publication provides four concise essays, followed by eighty catalogue entries grouped around the generic, specific, or symbolic representation of architecture, and the architecture of Jerusalem. Throughout the publication, Byzantine art is broadly defined as the art produced during the reign of the Byzantine Empire proper (330–1453) as well as works created from the mid-fifteenth-century conquest of the political state until the modern period. This body of material can more broadly be …

Fire and sand – Ancient Glass in the Princeton University Art Museum by Anastassios Antonaras (review)

Fire and sand – Ancient Glass in the Princeton University Art Museum by Anastassios Antonaras (review)

Review: The Art of Structure

The Art of . The Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 24 September 2010–30 January 2011 The Art of Structure brings together for the first time two pre-existing exhibits organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, each accompanied by a book and a website. The first, The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy , explores the work of four Swiss engineers trained at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich: bridge designers Robert Maillart, Othmar Ammann, and Christian Menn, and thin-shell designer Heinz Isler. The second, Felix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist , explores a range of thin-shell concrete vaults erected in Mexico by the Spanish-born architect-engineer Candela on the centenary of his birth (Figure 1). The combination of the two exhibits, conceived by curator Raymund Ryan, provides a broad, international overview of an artistic form of engineering that begins to challenge existing definitions of both engineering and architecture and expands the boundaries of what should be shown in an art museum. Figure 1 The Art of (photo by Tom Little for Carnegie Museum of Art) The driving force behind both earlier exhibits is Princeton engineering professor David Billington. For over five decades Billington has been on a personal crusade to identify, define, and propagate a new branch of civil and environmental engineering that he has dubbed structural art. Through lectures to his students and a long list of books and other publications over the years he has tried to change the boundaries of his field. …

Review: Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art

Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art . Princeton University Art Museum. 6 March–6 June 2010 Discussion of the Byzantine icon almost invariably focuses on images of sacred persons as intermediaries for communication with the divine. Architecture as Icon challenges this notion to ask how architectural representations-in contrast to figural representations-function in the Byzantine and Orthodox East. This ambitious exhibit brings together seventy-six objects in a variety of media from a vast territory (thirty-four separate collections from eleven countries) and spanning a broad chronology (fourth through nineteenth centuries) that represent architecture or that include images of architecture within their visual fields. The exhibit was co-organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and the European Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments in Thessaloniki, Greece, curated by Slobodan Curcic of Princeton, and formulated in collaboration with Evangelia Hadjitryphonos of Thessaloniki. An earlier iteration of the exhibit appeared at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. The exhibit suggests that an icon forms a screen or a window that separates the world of the faithful from the world of the sacred, while fostering communication between the two realms. This idea is laid out at the entrance to the exhibit through the selection and juxtaposition of objects and images. A seventeenth-century reliquary from Serres (northern Greece) takes the form of a centralized domed church; its luxurious materials express the inherent sanctity of its contents. However, although its gilded walls are lined with windows, these decorative …

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait. Exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum

Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait. Exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum

Museum Data Exchange: Learning How to Share

The Museum Data Exchange, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together nine art museums and OCLC Research to model data sharing in the museum community. The project created tools to extract CDWA Lite XML records out of collections management systems and share them via OAI-PMH. OCLC Research harvested 900K records from participating museums and analyzed them for standards conformance and interoperability. This article describes the free or open source tools; lessons learned in harvesting museum data; findings from the data analysis; and the state of data sharing and its applications in the museum community. Museum participants were the Cleveland Museum of Art; Harvard Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; National Gallery of Art; National Gallery of Canada; Princeton University Art Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum and Yale University Art Gallery

Rethinking Recarving: Ideals, Practices, and Problems of the “Wu Family Shrines” and Han China. Edited by Naomi Noble Richard. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum, 2008. 384 pp. $60.00 (paper).

Rethinking Recarving: Ideals, Practices, and Problems of the “Wu Family Shrines” and Han China. Edited by Naomi Noble Richard. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum, 2008. 384 pp. $60.00 (paper). - Volume 68 Issue 4

Princeton University Art Museum: handbook of the collections

With a vast collection of works spanning ancient to contemporary art - including Roman ceramics and mosaics, Chinese bronzes and calligraphy, Mayan ceramics, Old Master prints, and early Renaissance through modern and contemporary paintings, works on paper, and sculptures - the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading museums in the country. This comprehensive guide provides the first detailed look at the museum's extensive holdings and its fascinating history. With beautiful illustrations that present masterpieces from all areas of the collections - Ancient, Asian, American, ancient American, African, European, decorative arts, prints and drawings, and photography - it includes engaging descriptive texts on each work written by the museum's curatorial staff and guest authors. Among the many featured highlights are a bound set of Albrecht Durer's engravings of the Passion, paintings by John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, and photographs representing the medium's major movements and historical trends.

American art in the Princeton University Art Museum: v.1: Drawings and watercolors

American art in the Princeton University Art Museum: v.1: Drawings and watercolors

The art of structural design: a Swiss legacy

This book describes a landmark project that was produced through the collaboration of the Princeton University Art Museum and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The book and website bring together for the first time six Swiss engineers who form the most impressive group of structural artists in the twentieth century: Robert Maillart, Othmar H. Ammann, Heinz Isler, and Christian Menn; and the two teachers who influenced them, Wilhelm Ritter and Pierre Lardy. The book was developed out of Professor David P. Billington’s “Structures and the Urban Environment” course, which examines the technology, art, and social factors that are involved in the planning, design, and construction of large-scale buildings and bridges. This popular class introduces students from all disciplines to these structures, which are essential to the public life of modern industrial urbanized society. The exhibition includes an important pedagogical component as well.

Calotypomania

Other| June 01 1983 Calotypomania: THe Gourmet Guide to Nineteenth-Century Photography The Era of the French Calotype at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Sept. 17-Nov. 28, 1982 Catalogue of the same title, by Janet E. Buerger/64 pp./$15.00 (sb)Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839- 1870 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tex. Sept. 24-Nov. 21, 1982 and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 15, 1982-Feb. 13, 1983 Catalogue of the same title, with essays by Richard Brettell, Roy Flukinger, Nancy Keeler, and Sydney Kilgore. David R. Godine (forthcoming, September 1983)Masterpieces of the French Calotype at the Princeton University Art Museum Feb. 6-March 27, 1983E and at the Wellesley College Museum, April 15-June 12, 1983 (Published in conjunction with the exhibition) The Art of French Calotype, by André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis. Princeton University Press/284 pp./$75.00 (hb) Abigail Solomon-Godeau Abigail Solomon-Godeau Abigail Solomon-Godeau, a photography critic who lives in New York, has written for October, the Print Collector’s Newsletter, and Art in America. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1983) 11 (1-2): 7–12. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1983.11.1-2.7 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Abigail Solomon-Godeau; Calotypomania: THe Gourmet Guide to Nineteenth-Century Photography. Afterimage 1 June 1983; 11 (1-2): 7–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1983.11.1-2.7 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California1983 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bernini Drawings from Leipzig

Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini from the Museum der Bildenden Kunste, Leipzig, German Democratic Republic, which inaugurated a tour of six U.S. cities at Princeton University's Art Museum, is a rare and welcome opportunity for American audiences to study the remarkable draughtsmanship of Bernini and his circle, examples of which have been selected from the world's largest repository of such material. The exhibition catalogue was the outgrowth of a graduate seminar conducted by Irving Lavin in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, and was prepared by Lavin and his students: Pamela Gordon, Linda Klinger, Steven Ostrow, Sharon Cather, Nicola Courtright, and Ilana Dreyer.

The William C. Seitz Collection

William C. Seitz (1914-1974) was a remarkably gifted man: an artist, a museum curator of international importance and prestige, a scholar whose contributions to the history of art have revised our ideas about the past and heightened our awareness of the present, and a dedicated teacher who stimulated and encouraged the ideas and talents of the young.Bill Seitz was a vital and much loved member of the Princeton community, where he lived with his wife Irma from 1949 to 1960. He came to the University as a graduate student, receiving his degree in 1955. One-man shows of Seitz' paintings were held at the Princeton University Art Museum in 1949 and 1950, and in 1953 he joined the faculty of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology. During his years at the University, Professor Seitz gave generously of himself as a teacher, historian, critic, and painter.