Art History News
October 2006. Prof. Anna Brzyski presented a paper, "Mechanics of Art Canons," at the symposium Art Historical Canon and Its Functions, which took place at the Warburg Hause (University of Hamburg) in Hamburg, Germany. The symposium was a part of the Discourses of the Visible: National and International Perspectives Network organized and funded by the European Science Foundation.
Sept. 2006. Prof. Robert Jensen's essay "Vollard and Cézanne: An Anatomy of a Relationship" was published in the catalogue Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Grade (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications, 2006). This essay is a contribution to the first major exhibition devoted to one of the most influential dealers in the history of modern art, Ambroise Vollard. The show originates at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Fall 2006), travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (Winter 2007) and closes at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (Summer 2007).
"Vollard and Cézanne" provides a close reading of the dealer's business dealings with the artist who made his reputation and his wealth, Paul Cézanne. The essay reconstructs for the first time Cézanne's debut exhibition at Vollard's Paris gallery in 1895 (the artist's first show anywhere) and explores the development of the artist's market in the years immediately thereafter. Against this market activity and the dealer's clear exploitation of the artist, the essay asks why the artist may have agreed, insofar as he was aware of such things, to be exploited. Because Cézanne was so anxious to exhibit with Vollard, we have to rethink what the artist intended when he chose to exhibit so many pictures that critics and artist colleagues alike found to be "unfinished."
Sept. 2006. Congratulations to Suzanne Gray, who received her M.A. in Art History in the Spring of 2006, on her appointment as the Executive Staff Advisor for the Kentucky Arts Council.
May 2006. Congratulations to Art History seniors who graduated in 2005-2006: Heidi Caudill, magna cum laude, Beverly Eldridge, Amanda Filak, Sarah Hamlin, Sara Morris, and Tessa Nelson.
Heidi Caudill was admitted to the M.A. program in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Louisville in December 2005; she received second place in the 2005-6 Oswald Award in Humanities competition for her paper “The Virago, Hermaphrodite, and Jan Gossaert: A Metamorphosis in Netherlandish Art.”
Beverly Eldridge received the Callihan Book Award for Outstanding Senior 2006 and UK Study Abroad Scholarship (Aix-en-Provence, France) for Summer 2006.
Congratulations to Suzanne Gray and Mike Holdren for defending their M.A. Theses. Both Suzanne's thesis, "Diego Rivera: Transition from Cubism," and Mike's thesis, " A Crisis of Artistic Identity in the Career of John Sloan Revealed Through Technique, Subject, and Personal Records between the Years 1913-1916," were directed by Dr. Robert Jensen.
Joshua Reid, who received his M.A. in Art History in 2005 and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at University of Kentucky, received a Renaissance Center Consortium Grant to conduct research at the Newberry Library in Chicago in Fall 2005, and a grant to attend the Fall consortium seminar: “Emblems: Their Development and Context in European Material Culture.” He also presented the following papers: “The Kingly Image in Peter Paul Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I” at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in March, 2006; “Tapestry, Text, Ideology: Freeing Ovid from the House of Busyrane,” at the International Spenser Society Conference in Toronto in May 2006; and “‘Englishing the Italian Ariost’: Sir John Harington’s Orlando Furioso,” at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, held at Cambridge, England, in April 2005. His essay “Translation as Transformation: Sir John Harington Englishes the Orlando Furioso,” appeared in La Fusta: Journal of Italian Language and Literature 13 (Fall 2004 / Spring 2005): 53-58.
Congratulations to Matina Stanko, an incoming M.A. student in Art History on receiving the Millenium Award.
Rachel O’Neill and Julie Shubinski, second year M.A. students, have been awarded Teaching Assistantships in Art History for the academic year 2006-7.
David Riep, who received his M.A. in Art History in December 2005, has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in Art History at the University of Iowa (with financial support) http://www.art.uiowa.edu/, where he will continue his work on African art. The University of Iowa is home of the Project for Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa (PASALA), an interdisciplinary program of fellowships, scholarships, conferences, and publications on the visual arts in Africa. David will be working with Christopher Roy, Elizabeth M. Stanley, and Sarah Adams.
Prof. Monica Visona's article "Redefining Twentieth Century African Art. The View from the Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire," was published in African Arts, vol. 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 54-61, 93-94.
December 2005: Congratulations to Kate Wheeler and David Riep for defending their M.A. Theses. Kate's thesis, Augustan Ideologies of Greek and Roman: Vitruvius on Theater Buildings, was directed by Dr. Alice Christ, and David's thesis "Art on the Margins: a Reintroduction of the Art History of the Sotho of Southern Africa," was directed by Dr. Monica Visona.
Prof. Robert Jensen and Prof. Anna Brzyski were invited in May 2005 to Osaka, Japan, where they presented papers at an international symposium, Trans/Boundary in Modern Art, organized in conjunction with an exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh's works by the National Museum in Osaka and the University of Osaka.
Prof. Anna Brzyski's essay, “Constructing the Canon: The Album Polish Art and the Writing of the Modernist Art History of Polish 19th-Century Painting,” appeared in the on-line journal 19th Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004): http://19thc-artworldwide.org/spring_04/articles/brzy.html
