Art Crimes, Opening Reception Today!

For the first time, the Department of Art History is offering Art Crime and the Law, a course that examines illegal activities in the art world. As one of the nation’s premiere institutions for the study of art history, NYU presents this course as it is valuable for professionals entering the art market to grasp the significance of legal issues regulating the creation and trade of art. Topics covered include heritage destruction during conflict; WWII era looting and Nazi appropriation of art; thefts from museums and private collectors; complex forgery schemes; tomb raiding and the illicit antiquities market; restitution and repatriation litigations; vandalism and street art; museum acquisition standards; collecting practices and provenance investigations; and the emerging strategies of accumulating art as an investment. “Whether it’s Nazi plunder, the still-unsolved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990 in Boston, or, confronting us today, the destruction wrought at the ancient sites of Palmyra and Nineveh in present-day Syria and Iraq, respectively, crime against art is far-reaching in its ripple effects,” said Department of Art History chair Dennis Geronimus. “It is crime perpetrated not just against physical artifacts but against the people and cultures that value, protect, and preserve them. The preservation of cultural heritage cannot be more timely or urgent as a topic of serious inquiry, and I’m very encouraged to see it happen here at NYU.”

Last FAS event of the semester: Valentin de Boulogne at the Met!

NYU FAS Event: Saturday 12/3
Valentin de Boulogne
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Join Fine Arts Society
for our last event of the semester!
Valentin de Boulogne was the most prolific French follower of Caravaggio. This major loaned exhibition is organized by the Metropolitan Museum and the Musee du Louvre and collects nearly all sixty of his surviving paintings.

Meet: in front of the information desk in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 1PM
Where: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, take the 4/5/6 to the 86th Street subway stop, and walk east three avenues, and down to 82nd Street
Afterward seeing the exhibition altogether, feel free to see any of the other incredible exhibitions on view at the Met this season (including “Jerusalem: Every People Under Heaven,” “Max Beckmann” & “Fragonard: Drawing Triumphant”) .

From Professor Chris Wood: Interdisciplinary conference dedicated to Johann Joachim Winckelmann

The German Department, the Deutsches Haus NYU, and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies invite you to an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to Johann Joachim Winckelmann, held at NYU on December 8 and 9, 2016, in advance of the 300th anniversary of the birth of this pioneering antiquarian and art historian in 2017. Winckelmann: The Transalpine Fantasy of Modern Paganism seeks to re-frame, reassess, and generally defamiliarize the antiquarian and historian who wrote the script of obsessive German philhellenism.

Winckelmann is a paradoxical figure. He held up classical Greek sculpture as the time-transcending paragon of artistic expression and yet has been credited with creating the template of modern art historical method, which supposedly explains every art form as a product of local circumstances. He met the exacting standards of the antiquarian scholarship of his day, compiling a descriptive catalogue of the engraved gems in a great private collection and, in his magnum opus the History of Ancient Art (1764), offering remarks on Greek costumes and footwear on the evidence of statuary. But the taste for fact did not interfere with his critical appreciations, even open expressions of erotic admiration, of the sculpted body.

Please join us and a dozen speakers as we reconsider this enigmatic pioneer and his legacy in scholarship and beyond.

Book Launch—Centre Pompidou: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and the Making of a Modern Monument

Completed in January 1977, Richard Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s Centre Georges Pompidou was initially received skeptically by critics, but the public soon embraced Beaubourg as an essential—and well loved—Paris institution. Francesco Dal Co’s lively intellectual biography, Centre Pompidou: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and the Making of a Modern Monument (Nov. 29, Yale University Press) explores the Pompidou’s history and the reasons for its success, from its genesis as a politically calculated response to the turbulent 1968 student protests to the role played by architects in its construction, as well as the historical influences and the engineering solutions that inform its design. As Dal Co reveals, a key reason for the Centre Pompidou’s lasting significance lies in its ability to channel architectural memory, connecting it powerfully to Paris’s historic urban fabric.

In the weeks leading up to the Centre Pompidou’s fortieth anniversary, we invite you to join Francesco Dal Co, Robert M. Rubin, Martino Stierli, and Anthony Vidler as they consider the Pompidou’s contentious origins, its emergence as a key cultural landmark, and its future. This event is co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Art History, Urban Design, and Architecture Studies and the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, and a book signing will follow the panel discussion.

Francesco Dal Co is professor of history of architecture at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura Venezia (IUAV) and director of the architecture magazine Casabella.

Robert M. Rubin was the founding chair of the Centre Pompidou Foundation, and is an independent curator and cultural historian.

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art.

Anthony Vidler is Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

6:30pm

300 Silver Center, 100 Washington Sq. East

New York University, New York 10003

Free and Open to the Public

Please RSVP to pompidoupanelrsvp@gmail.com