Art History

On Thursday, October 7th Prof. Laurie Dahlberg gave a talk at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada titled “Amateur/Amateur: Thoughts on the Devolution of a Gentleman’s Art.”

Click on the below link for more details.

LD phot poster

I’m a physical chemist in the physics program with a long-standing personal interest in art history.  I’m teaching a new course this semester about the chemistry of photography.  Since the goal of the course is to understand the chemistry of light-sensitive materials, the first four weeks have stressed light and color, ionic and covalent compounds, and chemical reactions.   Alongside these topics, we’ve studied, and made, dichromate prints, cyanotypes, and diazo prints.  In contrast to conventional photography, none of these processes involve silver.

In the cyanotype process, a paper coated with a yellow light-sensitive solution is exposed to sunlight.  Within a few minutes, ultraviolet light induces the formation of an iron compound known as Prussian blue in exposed areas.  It’s quite magical.  The cyanotype process was invented by the renowned astronomer Sir John Herschel in the 1840s.  Prussian blue itself is part of another story.  Discovered in the early 1700s, it is the first modern artificial pigment and displaced ultramarine and cobalt blue from artists’ palettes.

A stunning cyanotype made from a black and white negative.

We’re now moving on to the chemistry of silver-based photography using a wonderful book by Roger Bunting called The Chemistry of Photography.  The highlight of this week’s experiment is making a silver mirror.  Next week, we’ll make salted paper prints, the precursor to silver/emulsion photography.

Photos and cyanotype: Kazio Sosnowski

Summer 2010 – Julia Rosenbaum

Photograph from a "strip map" of the Hudson.

An NEH Summer Institute Fellowship took me to Chicago for most of the summer for research at the Newberry Library. I am working on a couple of new projects related to mapping and art (one focusing on the Hudson River and tourism in the early 1800s) and the Newberry has an extraordinary collection of European and American maps from all periods as well as rich historical materials. Chicago is also a city rich in 20^th-century American art and architecture so I was also able to look closely at artwork I teach and work on. (The other great thing about Chicago is its food scene, so, as a confirmed foodie, I “studied” it very thoroughly.) Other projects that kept me busy were finalizing the text for a volume of essays on class identity that is being published this winter and writing a paper focusing on artistic responses to new mid-19thc. technologies for the Association of Historians of American Art symposium  I’m speaking at this fall.

Summer 2010 – Prof. Tom Wolf

Lady Archer Soapine Card

I continued my research about Asian-American artists by visiting a descendant of a fascinating, overlooked Japanese American set designer in Seattle.  But most of my summer was devoted to writing an article about the famous feminist writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Early in her career, in the 1880s, she worked as an artist, and her first husband was an painter.  Although a tremendous amount has been written about her (over 40 books) no one has really analyzed the art of her formative years:  the significance of the art she made in terms of gender issues, and the relation between her artistic concerns and those of her husband.  They lived in Providence, Rhode Island, which I visited several times to do research about their artistic context, and which will be incorporated in the essay I plan to submit for publication soon.

Summer 2010 – Noah Chasin

Lagos

Summer is a very conflicted season for academics. On the one hand, we are “not working” in the conventional sense, leading many friends and family members to believe that we have a guilt-free three-and-a-half-month vacation. The reality is that summer is when academics get the chance to focus on their own research in the absence of preparing class lectures, grading, committee work, and meeting with students. I was able to get away for a couple of weeks to Costa Rica with my family, but even there, writing continued on my most pressing project, a book-length manuscript on Team 10 and the ethics of participatory urbanism. My research focuses on the immediate postwar period in Europe where architects (working on the urban scale) undertook an approach to urban reconstruction that was radically different from their predecessors. Different because instead of assuming that the architect/designer was the supreme hand guiding the development of urban morphology, Team 10 felt that eliciting the input of once and future residents of a city would ground the metropolis both historically and functionally in a more ‘user-friendly’ format. My argument holds that Team 10’s work in the 1950s-70s foreshadows a lot of contemporary urban design practices that advocate for ad-hoc, self-organized, and participatory urban interventions. I also began working on an article derived from the aforementioned project on John Turner’s sites and services projects for the World Bank in the late-1960s. I published an article in the Journal of Architectural Education entitled “Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Šuštersi?, and Stealth,” and just at the end of the summer completed an article for ArtForum entitled ““STEALTH.unlimited: What It Takes To Make (And Un-Make) A City.”

Summer 2010 – Prof. Susan Merriam

Dutch Stone Houses, Hurley

I spent most of the summer in (very hot!) upstate New York working on two book projects. One, now in draft manuscript form, looks at representations of animals in early modern Europe. I’m particularly interested in exploring how the idea of the human was formed in relationship to the idea of the animal during this period. The second book, now in the research stages, is a hybrid of essays and cultural history. It examines the stretch of road leading from Kingston—New York’s first capital—to Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a medium security men’s prison located about 40 miles away. I made this drive once a week over the two semesters I taught in Bard’s Prison Initiative program, and was often struck by the number of settlements or places I came to imagine as utopias (early Dutch villages, summer camps, bungalow colonies) and dystopias (prisons, an abandoned reservation) along the route. The book examines both the road’s development (how this very rural area became the site of so many differing ideas about sociality) and theories about teaching as they relate to each place and moment in time. I also began an article on images of the Eucharist during the Catholic Reformation (forthcoming in an edited volume on Rubens’s Eucharist tapestries), and completed a book review to be published in Renaissance Quarterly (2011). I ended the summer with a research/pleasure trip to Stockholm and Berlin.

Summer 2010 – Prof. Patricia Karetzky

Prof. Patricia Karetzky and husband Monroe in Bejing artist Hou Guanbin's studio

During the summer I gave two talks: “Uses of the Past in Contemporary Chinese Art,” at Xiamen University Fujian in June  and “The Use of Hanzi in Contemporary Chinese Art”  at the Seventh International Conference  on Hanzi Calligraphy Education, Capital Normal University, in Beijing on June 29.  I also published an article Cui Xiuwen, Walking on Broken Glass for the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (vol. 9 no. 3:18-33).

Summer 2010- Prof. Laurie Dahlberg

Count Olympe Aguado, c. 1852

I spent my summer on three areas of work.  First, I did some legwork on my latest project, a study of the 19^th-century amateur as the driving force behind the discovery and evolution of photography.  I’m intrigued by the fact that amateurism itself has an evolution that is laid bare in the history of photography.  Early in the century, the Amateur with a capital “A” was a revered individual in Europe, respected for the serious scholarly contributions he made to science and the humanities, in such fields as astronomy, archaeology, history, and by 1839, photography.  But by 1890, thanks to the American entrepreneur/industrialist George Eastman, photography was opened to a new class of small “a” amateurs.  Scientific expertise and received ideas of taste and art were no longer a prerequisite, and amateurism in photography became associated with snapshooters, shutterbugs, camera fiends, and Americans, in short, caricatures of middlebrow aspirations.   I’ll be giving a talk on this new material in October, at Concordia University in Montreal.

I also had some writing deadlines pending, including an article celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Victor Regnault, one of the major figures in early French photography.  Co-written with Sébastien Poncet, a French historian of science, the article is being offered to an international journal of science for non-specialists.  A book review of The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast will appear next month in caa.reviews, and a review of the exhibition Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980 is forthcoming in the Winter 2010 issue of Aperture.

All work and no play…so I also worked while playing, restoring my chicken coop from an obscure piece of topiary to a functional building.

Summer 2010:  Prof. Susan Aberth

I attended the 5th International Symposium on Surrealism held June 18-20 at The Edward James Foundation, West Dean College located in Chichester, West Sussex (England).  Titled “Surrealism Laid Bare,” this year’s conference was supported by the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies and the Tate Museum’s project Surrealism and Non-Normative Sexuality.  “Querying Surrealism/Queering Surrealism” was the uniting focus of the two-day event, which was held in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery  Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna.  I opened the event with a talk titled “Leonora Carrington’s Bestiality,” held at Pallant House on June 18th.  After the conference I spent five days in Paris doing research on the Cuban surrealist painter Agustin Fernandez.