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Item The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: the Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture(2016-01-01) Zandi-Sayek, SibelItem Materials, Models, and the Market for Paintings in Early Colonial Quito, 1550-1650(2016-01-01) Webster, Susan V.Based mainly on unpublished documents, this study covers a wide range of materials and artistic models, available for painters in the local market since the beginning of the colony. It includes both records like imported paintings, its themes, features and prices; brushes, supports, pigments, binders, blotters and other pictorial making elements; as well as market conditions in the buying/sale of materials and art works. Evidence shows the richness of styles and materials, both local and imported, which the first painters of Quito had reached.Item Farago’s Global Art History(Emory College of Arts & Sciences, 2018-10-01) Palermo, Charles J."Anyone who’s been paying attention for the past two decades has noticed that art history (just like the other humanities) has been furiously globalizing itself. From fighting Eurocentrism to tracing global networks of exchange, to acknowledging the incommensurability of multiple modernities, to challenging the category of art itself as an ideological mystification developed in modern Europe—which continues to reproduce power structures and to project them onto other cultures and peoples—turning global is a move with a lot of sponsorship, both intellectual and institutional. These different attacks on an art history variously understood as blinkered, racist or Eurocentric have been canonized by art historians and, more importantly, by university administrations. Which is a good thing in lots of ways. Departments are adding full-time positions in areas they had previously left untaught or had relied on adjuncts or other non-tenure-eligible faculty to teach..."Item Review of "Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism"(2008-12-01) Palermo, Charles J."Pace Wildenstein’s exhibition Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism ran from 20 April to 23 June 2007 in New York. Those lucky enough to have seen it will surely recall a nice selection of well-known works and less widely published works, including pictures from private collections and from major museums in the United States and abroad. I expect the show itself would have ranked as a proud achievement for most museums. In addition to the fi ne selection of works on view, though, the gallery included specimens of early cinematographic equipment, which, while they may well be familiar to the historian of early film, helped introduce the exhibition’s premise to the art historian whose training is more strictly confined to painting. A screen near the entrance to the exhibition showed video from a vintage, hand-coloured film of the type of dancing made famous by Loïe Fuller; a room adjacent to a gallery of paintings showed examples of the early films that Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and their circle saw in the same years they developed cubism. I found the show not only a valuable opportunity to see a remarkable selection of paintings but also a welcome chance to learn about cinema and film technology at first hand, so to speak..."Item Tactile Translucence: Miró, Leiris, Einstein(The MIT Press, 2001-07-01) Palermo, Charles J."One might be tempted to see the background of Joan Miro's Head of a Catalan Peasant IV for what it is (albeit in a certain limited sense): the Miro's physical encounter with the canvas. This scumbled blue ground -which I will call the background even though it often refuses or complicates the organization of a deep space- records in some detail the application of a thin layer of paint. Variations in the density of the paint even across the trajectory stroke appear in Head of a Catalan Peasant with exemplary clarity, so that t position of such brush strokes makes visible the act of painting-that kind of exploration of the surface, in which the variation of direction and pressure play important roles in revealing the support to the beholder. Nowhere is this effect clearer than in the traces of stretcher bars that appear intermittently Miro's paintings from around 1925, to which I'll return presently..."Item Rembrandt’s Etched Angels: Traces of the Divine(2015-07-01) Levesque, CatherineThis paper considers the paradoxes inherent in Rembrandt’s treatment of angels in his etched works where his choice of subject and medium directly addresses the fraught relation between the material and the spiritual, between reason and imagination, issues at the heart of Rembrandt’s artistic enterprise and central as well to the long reformation. Rembrandt’s etchings with angels draw particular attention to his craft, especially the distinction between the etching (on the plate) and the print (on paper) whereby the paper (as opposed to the plate) provides an unstable and fragile surface particularly suited to convey unsteadiness of all earthly things. Rembrandt’s attention to surface and to tonal effects beyond the etching needle becomes more pronounced after 1647 when he discovered Japanese paper. Two prints — Abraham and the Angels Eating (1656) and the so-called Dr. Faustus (1653) — exemplify what this increasingly experimental attitude and play of imagination meant for the artist’s understanding of Creation in general and angels in particular.Item Historical Art, Ecology, and Implication(2019-04-01) Braddock, Alan C."For fifteen years, I have researched, published, lectured, and taught about art and ecology, focusing on contemporary contexts as well as historical work produced long before Ernst Haeckel coined “ecology” (Oecologie) in 1866, and prior to the emergence of modern environmentalism..."Item Review of Rachael Z. DeLue. Arthur Dove: Always Connect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 311 pp.(2017-10-01) Palermo, Charles J.Rachael Z. Delue’s study of Arthur Dove’s career makes some bold choices and reveals a remarkable array of forces at work in what is probably the best body of painted work in the circle around Alfred Stieglitz. DeLue avoids many classical approaches, questions, and issues; instead, she delivers a visual cultural investigation of historical discourses—about weather, sound recording and broadcast, shorthand, and others—that pays substantial dividends when DeLue returns to discuss the paintings. This is an exemplary art historical appropriation of visual culture, and it puts forward a strong thesis about what motivates Dove’s major works of 1921 to 1946.Item Review of Philippe Geinoz, Relations au travail: Dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubisme: Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy(College Art Association, 2017-03-01) Palermo, Charles J.As a literary genre, the thèse- or habilitation-turned-book will have few genuine enthusiasts. These texts are long and often not very lively. Among the examples I’ve encountered, Philippe Geinoz’s Relations au travail: Dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubism: Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy [Relations at work: Dialogue between poetry and painting in the cubist epoch—Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Reverdy] is among the very best. Indeed, if I had encountered it sooner, it might have enriched some of my own recent work on Pablo Picasso’s milieu. That’s because the issues in which Geinoz and I are both interested revolve around the same formal and interpretive problems: what kind of work does a Cubist painting by Picasso or a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire require of its viewer/reader, and how does this demand raise methodological issues for us?Item Responses to Davis, “Neurovisuality”(2011-06-01) Palermo, Charles J.Things remain visible to people outside the visuality within which they were intentionally produced, though what is visible in an artifact in this context (or what is visible about it) may differ from what is visible in the context of visuality. By the same token, people can succeed to many visualities, though both Wölfflin and Panofsky were somewhat uncertain (on different grounds) about just how far it is possible to do so when we are dealing with visualities constituted in the past and accessible to us only in things made to be visible within them that happen to have survived into our own visual world.Item Questions for Adams(2014-08-01) Palermo, Charles J.Thomas J. Adams’ review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century begs what I consider to be a vital question. In what follows, I want to pose that question. In that sense, I am criticizing Adams. I should say, further, that that is the only sense in which I understand myself to be criticizing Adams. I don’t aim to find fault with his general thesis, that by “eliding history, the terms of [Piketty’s] discussion imagine solutions without politics,” which is to say, without a good account of the history of inequality, you cannot have an effective, mobilized political engagement.Item False Gods: Authority and Picasso’s Early Work(2011-01-01) Palermo, Charles J.In his Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism, Steven Knapp discusses some revisionist biblical criticism. This materialist criticism uses social history to recover contexts for biblical history, and does so specifically for the purpose of casting doubt on canonical biblical texts. The substance of the accounts is not my interest here, nor are the aims of their revisions. What I am concerned to trace is a problem Knapp finds in them generally. The problem is: if you question the sacred texts in light of historical circumstances, why do they still matter to you? “The answer,” as Knapp puts it...Item Miró’s Politics(2013-01-01) Palermo, Charles J.Filippo Brunelleschi built a perspective device that combined a rendering of the Florence baptistery with a mirror. Its story is one of the origin myths of the art and science of perspectival projection—of what the Florentine renaissance called costruzzione leggitima. Brunelleschi painted a small picture of the Florentine baptistery, which is located directly opposite the entrance of the Florentine cathedral. This picture and the accompanying apparatus were to provide a demonstration of a new technique, which we now call perspective. But Brunelleschi wanted his picture not just to show this technique, but also to demonstrate its accuracy, its special ability to put objects in space and in correct relation to one another. So he provided the beholder an apparatus that would permit each beholder to demonstrate to himself the validity of Brunelleschi’s technique.Item Action and Standing a Round(2016-05-01) Palermo, Charles J.Some philosophers, like Roger Scruton, famously deny that a photograph can be a work of art. On their views, whatever is truly photographic is sheerly mechanical: it is dependent on the objects of the world, not on the ideas, beliefs or intentions of the photographer. Photography cannot make art, because there is no way to intend something photographically. To help us grasp what is essentially photographic, Scruton suggests we consider what he calls an “ideal photograph,” which is (as he explains) a “logical fiction.” The “ideal photograph” is the product of photography stripped of all manipulation and reduced to what is specifically photographic. Some corresponding ideal could be posited for painting. The ideal painting, Scruton explains, stands in what he calls “a certain ‘intentional’ relation to a subject.” Among other things, that means that it stands in a certain relation to “a representational act, the artist’s act,” so that “in characterizing the relation between a painting and its subject we are also describing the artist’s intention.” “In characterizing the relation between the ideal photograph and its subject,” on the other hand, as Scruton explains, “one is characterizing not an intention but a causal process, and while there is, as a rule, an intentional act involved, this is not an essential part of the photographic relation.”1 Because of this, your interest in a photograph can always be reduced to an interest in what the photograph pictures, which we’ll call (following some philosophers) the “pro-filmic event,” or to some nonphotographic manipulation of the photographic image after it is formed. Your appreciation of the photograph can never be an appreciation of it as a photograph, because there is no way for a photograph to show something, precisely as it appears, exactly because the photographer means what the photograph shows. And that is because of the kind of action taking a photograph is, on Scruton’s account. You can take a photograph intentionally, but you cannot intend the photographic image itself. The image is an unwilled, merely mechanical copy of the pro-filmic event.Item Literary Criticism(Oxford University Press, 2014-07-01) Palermo, Charles J.To define the domain of literary criticism would require some contentious choices and some contended definitions—about what the “literary” is and about what kinds of interventions can be included as “criticism.” The aim of this entry is not to trace the whole history of literary criticism. Nor should it be assumed that modern literary criticism is naturally or necessarily academic. The following discussion will address such matters and operate with such definitions and omissions, always mindful that doing so does not necessarily settle anything.Item André Masson: Into the ‘Humus Humaine'(Getty Research Institute, 2014-01-01) Palermo, Charles JMuch of how World War I is understood today is rooted in the artistic depictions of the brutal violence and considerable destruction that marked the conflict. Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged examines how the physical and psychological devastation of the war altered the course of twentieth-century artistic Modernism. Following the lives and works of fourteen artists before, during, and after the war, this book demonstrates how the conflict and the resulting trauma actively shaped artistic production. Featured artists include Georges Braque, Carlo Carrà, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Léger, Wyndham Lewis, André Masson, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Nash, and Oskar Schlemmer. Materials from the Getty Research Institute’s special collections―including letters, popular journals, posters, sketches, propaganda, books, and photographs―situate the works of the artists within the historical context, both personal and cultural, in which they were created.Item Truth in Painting—Comedic Resolution in Bruegel’s Landscape with the Magpie on the Gallows(Routledge, 2012-01-01) Levesque, CatherineDwelling on the rich interconnections between parody and festivity in humanist thought and popular culture alike, the essays in this volume delve into the nature and the meanings of festive laughter as it was conceived of in early modern art. The concept of 'carnival' supplies the main thread connecting these essays. Bound as festivity often is to popular culture, not all the topics fit the canons of high art, and some of the art is distinctly low-brow and occasionally ephemeral; themes include grobianism and the grotesque, scatology, popular proverbs with ironic twists, and a wide range of comic reversals, some quite profound. Many hinge on ideas of the world upside down. Though the chapters most often deal with Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, they spill over into other countries, times, and cultures, while maintaining the carnivalesque air suggested by the book's title.Item Nature Discerned: Providence and Perspective in Gilles van Coninxloo’s Sylva(Brill, 2012-01-01) Levesque, CatherineItem Introduction to "Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miro in the 1920s"(Penn State University Press, 2008-01-01) Palermo, Charles J.ixed Ecstasy advances a fundamentally new understanding of Miró’s enterprise in the 1920s and of the most important works of his career. Without a doubt, Joan Miró (1893–1983) is one of the leading artists of the early twentieth century, to be ranked alongside such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Pollock in his contributions to modernist painting. Still, Miró’s work has eluded easy classification. He is best known as a Surrealist, but, as Charles Palermo demonstrates, Miró’s early years in Barcelona and Paris require a revisionist account of Miró’s development and his place in modernism. Palermo’s arguments are based on new research into Miró’s relations with the rue Blomet group of writers and artists, as well as on close readings of the techniques and formal structures of Miró’s early drawings and paintings. Chapter by chapter, Palermo unfolds a narrative that makes a cogent argument for freeing Miró from long-standing dependence on Surrealism, with its strong emphasis on dreams and the unconscious. Miró, along with associates such as Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, and Michel Leiris, pressed representation to its limit at the verge of an ecstatic identification with the world.Item "Introduction" & "Modernisms and Authority"(University of California Press, 2015-10-01) Palermo, Charles J.Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusiñol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compelling—something to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of art’s call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of one’s response to it, the modern subject’s place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.