Miriam Basilio was on research leave in fall 2010 on a Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship from New York University. She has completed her first book, Drawing in the Masses: Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War, and is writing the second, The Evolving Canon: Displaying Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art, 1945-2004. Her article “Museums for the People: David Seymour’s Photographs of The Duke of Alba’s Palace in Madrid, 1936,” appeared in the catalogue for the International Center of Photography exhibition, The Mexican Suitcase, and forthcoming is “`Serial Effects’: Picasso’s Response to Propaganda, and Atrocities,” to be published in the Museu Picasso Barcelona catalogue of the exhibition Picasso, Viñetas de batalla. In October 2010, Professor Basilio presented a paper titled “The Question of Audience Reception and the Construction of a Cult of Personality for Francisco Franco” at the conference, “The Personality Cults of Modern Dictators,” held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. This spring, Professor Basilio is teaching an advanced undergraduate seminar on “Histories of Display: Modern Museums, Exhibitions, and Art History,” one of her principal areas of research interest. She is looking forward to a trip to Barcelona during Spring Break for the opening of the Picasso Museum exhibition.
Mosette Broderick’s book, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age, was published on October 26th, 2010 by Alfred A Knopf. She has lectured widely on aspects of the book in some twenty New York City clubs and institutions and for many civic associations. She has done talks at Cooper Union and The AIA Chapter in New York and interviews at major booksellers and on New York, Chicago, Connecticut, National and Irish Public Radio. In addition to directing the Department of Art History’s popular, fast-growing undergraduate program in Urban Design and Architecture Studies, this September – and with the invaluable assistance of Jon Ritter and Peggy Coon — Professor Broderick launched our first Master’s program, the London-based M. A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture. Along with Professors Karmel and Krinsky, in October 2010 she participated in a symposium about the photographic work of Alfred Stieglitz, “Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs of the Changing City,” co-sponsored by the Seaport Museum New York, NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and the Department of Art History. Professor Broderick was awarded NYU’s Distinguished Teaching medal for 2009-10. She continues work on her current book project on the houses of Fifth Avenue from Washington Square North to the Jewish Museum.
Barry Flood’s recent publications include the essay “Introduction: Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” co-written with Nebahat Avcioğlu, in Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century, a special volume of the journal Ars Orientalis co-edited by Professors Flood and Avcioğlu; and a contribution to “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization,” which appeared in the journal October in summer 2010. Lectures given in 2010 include “Beyond Representation: Islam’s Bilderverbot and the Animate Image,” at the Department of the History of Art, Yale University, and the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity, Corpus Christi College, Oxford; “Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral: Ambiguity and Efficacy in the Nishapur Wall-Paintings,” at the conference, “Images at Work: Image and Efficacy from Antiquity to the Rise of Modernity” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz; “A Shard’s Tale: Cosmopolitanism and Consumption in Medieval Afghanistan” at the Art Institute of Chicago; “From Gilding to Whitewash: Aesthetics and Ethics of Distraction in the Early Mosque,” the Trehan Lecture at the Bard Graduate Center, New York; “Entre aniconisme et idolâtrie; l’Islam et l’image dans les polémiques de la Réforme,” presented in the Programme d’accueil, de réflexion et de rencontre of the workshop “1500-1600. Entre Islam et Nouveaux Mondes: les réformes dans un contexte global,” part of the program Histoire sociale de l’art, histoire artistique du social, Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, Paris; “Conflit et cosmopolitisme dans le Sindh Arabe,” École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris; and “Rethinking Representation: Islamic Law as a Source for Image Theory,” in the series Ein Gott – kein Bild? Konstitutionen von Bildpraxis und Bilderverbot zwischen Judentum, Christentum und Islam, at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. In March 2011, he will be a guest scholar the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence.
Dennis Geronimus has been working on two major projects: his monograph on the painter Jacopo da Pontormo, accepted for publication by Yale University Press, and an exhibition devoted to the career of Piero di Cosimo, scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in fall 2014. An essay titled “Into the Wild: Landscape as Animating Agent in the Spalliera Paintings of Piero di Cosimo” will appear in the collected volume, Cassone Paintings, The Civil and the Savage; another essay, “Silenus’s Song: High and Low Poetics in the Art of Piero di Cosimo and Jacopo da Pontormo,” will be published in a collection titled Penser l’étrangeté. His review of the exhibition, “Bronzino: pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici” (“Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici”), on view at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence from September 23, 2010 – January 23, 2011, will be published this spring in the journal Renaissance Studies. Professor Geronimus will deliver a lecture at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., titled “Candid Fictions: Process and Perception in Italian Renaissance Portraiture.” This will be the second of two lectures to coincide with and celebrate the Clark’s “Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450–1850″ exhibition. In fall 2010, he taught a new Special Topics course, “Around Michelangelo: Art in Florence and Rome, 1475-1550,” and this academic year he is participating once again in the Freshman Presidential Scholars program and DURF research conference, as a session chair. Professor Geronimus will continue to develop his book project on Pontormo in Williamstown, Mass., as a Clark Fellow in fall 2011.
Professor Emerita Isabelle Hyman’s current research is on twentieth-century architecture, particularly the work of Marcel Breuer and mid-century modernism. Her most recent lecture on this subject, in March 2011, was the first in a series of lectures on architecture at the Muscarelle Museum, College of William of Mary. Between 2008 and 2011 she lectured on “Modernist Enlightenment in the Suburbs: Marcel Breuer – His Schools, Factories, Libraries and Churches” at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Cincinnati, and on “The Importance of Marcel Breuer at Mid-Century” at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture. At the 2009 conference, “Bernard Berenson at Fifty” — at Villa I Tatti in Florence — she lectured on “Bernard Berenson and Archer Huntington — the man we most wanted to meet.” This talk will be published in the forthcoming conference proceedings. In 2009 she was interviewed by Jonathan Lerner of Metropolis Magazine on Marcel Breuer’s Central Library Building in Atlanta. She is an active member of the Advisory Committee of the Syracuse University NEH project to produce a digital edition of Marcel Breuer Archives (which includes Breuer material in Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center, in European repositories, and in the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C.).
Pepe Karmel stepped down as Chair of the Department of Art History after a three-year term that witnessed, among other accomplishments, the expansion and renovation of the Department’s physical plant, including the creation of a new seminar room. Professor Karmel’s recent publications include “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma: Bearden, Picasso, and Pop Art,” in Romare Bearden: American Modernist (Studies in the History of Art 71), published by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Washington, DC (2011); the essay “Cancellation/Creation—Jasper Johns: Drawings over Prints,” which appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition, Jasper Johns: Drawing Over at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery (2010); “Adolph Gottlieb: Self and Cosmos,” in the catalogue for the exhibition, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2010); and “Yves Klein: Art and Alchemy,” published in Art in America in 2010. Essays in press include “Between Line and Color: Picasso, Ingres, and Delacroix,” for the catalogue of the Lazarof Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and “Minimalism,” for the new collection catalogue of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Professor Karmel organized a panel on “Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs of the Changing City” at NYU in October 2010 in conjunction with the Seaport Museum exhibition, Alfred Stieglitz New York, and lectured on “Pictorialisms: Alfred Stieglitz and Modern Painting.” In 2010 he lectured on “The Woven Image: Monet and Jackson Pollock” at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, in connection with their exhibition, Monet and Abstraction, and on “The Birth of the Grid: From Decoration to Abstraction” for the Hascoe Lecture Series, “Pioneers of Abstraction and Their Legacy,” at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT). Lectures presented in 2011 include “Labyrinths, Galaxies, and Ejaculations [on Abstract Expressionism]” at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and “Cool vs. Hot: The End of Expressionism” for a panel on “Abstract and Representational: Expressionism in New York after World War II” at the Museum of the City of New York. He is currently at work on a book titled Abstract Art, 1910-2010.
Carol Krinsky devotes much of her time to being the Department of Art History’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, a position she has held for four years. In addition to this service, in June 2010 she taught a short course on American commercial and religious architecture at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany, through the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program. Her summer travels took her to Malta and its sister island, Gozo, and she incorporated an account of prehistoric architecture there into “History of Western Art I” this year. She did her first Skype lecture for the University of New Mexico, on contemporary architecture for Native Americans. Professor Krinsky’s forthcoming publications include several encyclopedia entries and an article about the ways in which the port facilities in New York shaped other aspects of the city, to be published in a book about port cities around the world due out this spring. She is preparing a chronicle of building in New York since 1961, when the zoning rules were changed. Along with Professors Karmel and Broderick, in October 2010 Professor Krinsky participated in a symposium about the photographic work of Alfred Stieglitz, “Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs of the Changing City,” co-sponsored by the Seaport Museum New York, NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and the Department of Art History. And, she wrote two articles – one on Stieglitz and the new architecture of his time, the other on the art deco design of the steamship Normandie — for Seaport, the magazine of the South Street Seaport Museum.
Elizabeth Mansfield completed the manuscript of her book on the French painter François-André Vincent and is looking forward to its publication later this year. Titled The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting, the book aims to reorient the field of late eighteenth-century French art history toward a broader understanding of visual culture between 1780 and 1815. Professor Mansfield’s work on Vincent led her to develop a new advanced undergraduate seminar on the visual culture of the French Revolution, “Art in Revolution,” which is being offered for the first time this spring. Along with her work on eighteenth-century French painting, she also continues her study of realism: the essay “A New Parrhasius: Duane Hanson’s Uncanny Realism” recently appeared in the anthology Contemporary Art and Classical Myth. In September 2010, she presented a lecture on “Seeing Satire at the Salon of 1791” at the Columbia University Faculty Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.
Shelley Rice was recently named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, an honor she shares with her colleague Kenneth Silver. Back from a sabbatical year, Professor Rice spent fall 2009 as the Dr. Carlo S. Fleischmann Visiting Scholar in the Art History Institute of the University of Zurich, where she taught and began work on a new research project entitled Local Space/Global Visions: Archives, Networks, and Visual Geography Around 1900. The paper given in Zurich will be published this year in an anthology entitled The Geography of Photography: American Photography, part of the German series Studies in the History and Theory of Photography. Continuing research on this topic will be the subject of her lecture for the Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History conference to be held at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in late March 2011. In March, Professor Rice will deliver a talk in the seminar, Lawrence Alloway Reconsidered at the Tate Britain, an event organized by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute. In addition to publishing an essay on Alloway and George Kubler in Art Journal in spring of 2010, Professor Rice has recently written an extended text for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she lectured in March of 2010 in a symposium dedicated to Photography Since 1960. The essay, on the history of the nude and body art in photography, will be published in the Photography Department’s Collections Catalog in 2010. Ongoing projects include a book project with South African photographer Pieter Hugo; a consultancy with the Reitberg Museum in Zurich, designed to help that institution organize and preserve its diverse collections of non-Western photography; and the editing of an anthology of collected essays on photography and multimedia art.
Jon Ritter is currently working to revise for publication his Ph.D. dissertation, The American Civic Center: Urban Ideals and Compromise on the Ground. New research projects focus on the role of New York’s Fifth Avenue Association in the development of the 1916 zoning law, and a study of the public space and design of amusement parks in early 20th-century American cities. During the 2009-10 academic year, Professor Ritter participated in the Freshman Presidential Scholars Program. He continues to teach and advise students in the undergraduate Urban Design and Architecture Studies Program, and to develop, promote, and recruit students for the department’s new, highly successful graduate program, the London-based M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture.
Julia Robinson’s exhibition, John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence, which had first appeared at the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (MACBA) in October 2009-January 2010, was remounted (in February 2010) at the Hennie Onstad Kunst Center in Oslo and traveled in September 2010 to Heerlen, the Netherlands. In summer 2010 Professor Robinson traveled to Madrid to install another exhibition she had curated, New Realisms — 1957-62: Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle, at the Museo Reina Sofia; the book, which she edited New Realisms was co-published by the Reina Sofia and MIT Press. With documentary footage gleaned directly from the artists and other primary materials gathered for that exhibition, Professor Robinson crafted a new advanced undergraduate seminar for fall 2010, “New Realisms: Object, Spectacle & Performance in the Art of the 1960s,” which examined 1960s definitions of the “newly real.” As faculty adviser to the Department of Art History’s Fine Arts Society, Professor Robinson led students on several trips, including one through the Chelsea galleries and another to the exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s early drawings at the Morgan Library. She also delivered a lecture titled “The Auratic Everyday” at the Andy Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh, and another lecture on the artist Alison Knowles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in connection with the exhibition, Women in Fluxus. Among her current projects are an upcoming exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, on which she is collaborating with Lynn Gumpert of the Grey and Marvin Taylor of Bobst Library’s Fales Archive, as well as a volume of critical writings on John Cage, and a collection of the writings of the artist Claes Oldenburg.
Ann Macy Roth was the J. Clawson Mills Fellow in Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the 2009-10 academic year. While at the Met, she continued to prepare for publication three decorated tomb chapels purchased from the Egyptian government in 1908. Over the summer, her research for this project took her to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and the Neues Museum in Berlin, where she examined other chapels and objects from the same cemetery and gathered archival information on their excavation. A paper titled “Twisted Kilts: Variations in Aspective Representation in Old Kingdom Mastaba Chapels” will be published this year in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference in Old Kingdom Art and Archaeology, May 2009. She will present a lecture on “Stacked Meat and Missing Clothing: Patterns and Anomalies in a Small Fifth Dynasty Mastaba Chapel” at the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt in April 2011. Other forthcoming publications include an article titled “Upper Egyptian Heliopolis: Thebes, Archaism, and the Political Ideology of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III,” to be published in The Art and Culture of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Dorothea Arnold (Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 19), and a book chapter on the representation of foreigners in Egyptian art for Blackwell’s Companion to Egyptian Art. Professor Roth continues to work on two long-term book projects, a volume presenting her archaeological field research at Giza and a study of patterns in the representation of gender and fertility concepts in ancient Egypt. This spring, she is teaching a new advanced undergraduate seminar on “Egyptian Visions of Life: Daily Life Scenes in Tomb Chapels of the Pyramid Age.”
Professor Emerita Lucy Freeman Sandler is currently working to complete a book tentatively titled The Bohuns and their Books: Illuminated Manuscripts for Aristocrats in Fourteenth Century England, to be published by the British Library. Support for this publication is being provided by a Mellon Emeritus Professor Fellowship. In 2010, Professor Sandler published three essays on Bohun manuscripts, “Mary de Bohun’s ‘Livret de saintes’ in Copenhagen,” in Tributes to Nigel Morgan, Contexts of Medieval Art: Images, Objects & Ideas; “Rhetorical Strategies in the Pictorial Imagery of Fourteenth-Century Psalters: The Case of the Bohun Psalters,” in Rhetoric beyond Words, Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages; and “‘Written with the Finger of God’: Fourteenth-Century Images of Scribal Practice in the Lichtenthal Psalter,” in Teaching Writing, Learning to Write: Proceedings of the XVIth Colloquium of the Comité international de paleographie latine. Other recent or forthcoming publications include “A Scientific Textbook for a Noble Student: Sacrobosco’s Treatises in the New York Public Library,” in The Medieval Book, Glosses from Friends & Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel (2010) and articles on illustrated copies of the Anglo-Norman “La lumere as lais” (“Enlightenment for the Laity”). Professor Sandler is one of three co-editors of the journal Studies in Iconography, and she is a member of the steering committee for the major British Library exhibition of manuscripts of the kings and queens of England, opening later in 2011.
Kenneth Silver was awarded the rank of Chevalier in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in summer 2010. His show, Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936, opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on October 1, 2010, and at the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao on February 21, 2011. As Adjunct Curator of Art at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, Professor Silver curated Exotic Encounters: Art, Travel, and Modernity in the Collection of the Bruce Museum (spring 2010) and the upcoming exhibition, Cindy Sherman: Work from the Collection of the Bruce Museum (winter 2011). Among his recent publications are the catalogues for these exhibitions, and essays in the catalogues for the shows Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations of a Crazy World (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania), Roy Lichtenstein: Mostly Men (Leo Castelli Gallery, New York), and Queer Voice, (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania). This year, Professor Silver taught two new advanced undergraduate seminars, “Art Between the Wars” and “Medieval/Modern.”
Kathryn Smith spent her 2009-10 sabbatical leave completing her book, The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England, to be published by the British Library and the University of Toronto Press. She returned from leave to take up the position of Chair of the Department of Art History. In summer 2010 she lectured on English medieval wall painting in South Newington, Oxfordshire (UK), and was interviewed by the BBC Oxford Evening News (television) in conjunction with that lecture. In February 2011 she delivered a lecture at Bowdoin College, “Bringing the ‘Holie Companie of Heven’ to Earth,” for the opening of the exhibition, Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum. In March 2011 she will speak about an illustrated Provençal miscellany for NYU’s Medieval Forum. In fall 2010, she team-taught (with Fiona Griffiths of the History Department) a graduate colloquium titled “Women and the Book: Scribes, Artists, and Readers from Late Antiquity through the Fourteenth Century,” a teaching opportunity made possible by NYU’s Humanities Initiative. Professor Smith completed articles or essays for the journal Studies in Iconography, an edited volume in honor of medievalist Pamela Sheingorn, and a collection titled The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages, which she is co-editing with colleagues in French and Comparative Literature. She currently serves as a consultant to the Walters Art Museum in connection with “Parchment to Pixel,” an NEH-funded project to digitize and catalogue the western European illuminated manuscripts in the Walters’ collection. She continues to serve as Series Editor for Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols Publishers).
Edward J. Sullivan’s recent publications include the essays “Rafael Ferrer in the Tropics: Encounters with Caribbean Art,” in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Rafael Ferrer at New York’s El Museo del Barrio (2010); “Art Worlds of Nueva York,” in the catalogue, Nueva York 1613-1945 (2010), which Sullivan also edited; and “Professor Esteban Vicente: Teaching and Creativity in His Art,” in the catalogue Concrete Improvisations: Esteban Vicente. Collages and Sculptures. The exhibition Concrete Improvisations, which Sullivan co-curated with Lynn Gumpert of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, opened at the Grey on January 10, 2011 and from there goes to The Meadows Museum, Dallas and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia Spain. In summer 2010, Professor Sullivan gave a series of three lectures on modern Latin American art at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. He lectured on “Juan Soriano and Surrealism in Mexico in the 1930s” in a conference at Rice University, Houston, TX, on “Surrealism in the Americas,” and on “Caribbean Art Now” in a panel on Caribbean art at the Association of Art Museum Directors meeting in Ponce, Puerto Rico. This spring he is giving a three-part lecture series on “Latin American artists in Paris 1880 to 1980” at NYU in Paris. A current book project, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller & Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, has been accepted for publication by Yale University Press. Professor Sullivan is working on two other exhibitions, Creatures of Earth and Sky: Animal Imagery and the Art of Juan Soriano, to be shown at The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, TX, in spring 2012 and a mid-career retrospective of Peruvian photographer Milagros de la Torre for The Americas Society, New York (also 2012).
Fields of Vision 