MEMBER UPDATES: FALL 2011
Timothy O. Benson’s recent publications include “Kriegszeit: German Artists and the Great War” in Max Liebermann: Art and International Modernism, edited by Marion Deshmukh, Barbara Gaehtgens, Francoise Forster-Hahn (German Historical Institute and Berghahn Books, 2011), “Brücke, French art and German national identity” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, edited by Christian Weikop (Ashgate, 2011), “Central Europe: Questions of Identity” inThe Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Parsons, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford University Press, 2011) and “Fourteen Poems by Tagore with Lithographs by Ricahrd Janthur : An Introduction” in Something Old, Something New: Rabindranath Tagore 150th Birth Anniversary Volume, ed. Pratapaditya Pal (Mumbai: The Marge Foundation, 2011).
His papers included “Painting the Impossible: Myth, History, and Cultural Renewal” forRing Seminar: Mythic Legends and Wagnerian Fables organized by the LA Opera, LA 2010 and “What You See Is What You Get: Mobility, Geography and the Modernist Magazine,” Keynote address, Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality, Second Conference of the AHRC Modernist Magazines Project, University of Sussex, July 2009. His exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included “George Grosz – Social Critic” (2010), “Myths, Legends, and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources” (with an installation by Achim Freyer) (2010), and “Shell-Shocked: Expressionism after the Great War” (2008).
He served as panel chair for the joint HGCEA/EAM session, “High and Low in Central Europe – Dada and Constructivism to Neo-Dada,” at the EAM meeting at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, September 2010. He will chair the HGCEA Emerging Scholars session at the CAA annual meeting in February 2012 in Los Angeles.
Margaret Betz, attended the Kandinsky evening at the Phillips Collection on September 1, 2011 in Washington, DC. It was a true Russian evening, with sakuski, music and vodka tasting. USC and The Institute of Modern Russian Culture (IMRC) invited Betz to speak on September 9, along with an impressive array of scholars, at the symposium, “Demonocracy. Russian Satirical Journals in the Russian 1905 Revolution.” Shortly, her chapter on Russia (“Irony, Derision and Magical Wit: Censors As a Spur to Russian Abstract Art”) will be published in a volume entitled Killing Images: Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Robert J. Goldstein (Palgrave/Macmillan). Betz still loves teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she regularly give courses in art and spirituality, Kandinsky, and Malevich and Russian Modernism.
This fall, Annie Bourneuf has started teaching as an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently finished her dissertation, The Visible and the Legible: Paul Klee, 1916-1923. Her essay on "Picasso, Braque, and the Uses of the Print, 1910-1912" was just published in the Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-12 exhibition catalogue, ed. Eik Kahng, and she will give a talk about Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin at the Blue Rider Centenary Symposium at the Tate Modern this November.
Jay A. Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs curated a show at the Clark this summer "Spaces: Photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth" (June 12 - September 5, 2011). She also published this exhibition review: "The Politics of Geography and Process: Impressions from South Africa," Art in Print 1, 3 (2010): 26-28.
Michelle Facos, professor of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington, will present a paper, "Romantikforschung zur Malerei aus Dänemark, Norwegen und Schweden" at the conference Perspektiven europäischer Romantik-Forschung heute held 23-26 November in Greifswald, Germany) and will give a lecture, "Collecting the Swedish Landscape Then and Now" at the American Scandinavian Foundation on 12 January in connection with the exhibition Luminous Modernism: Scandinavian Art Comes to America 1912.
Eva Forgacs, Adjunct Professor at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, was awarded a grant from the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas at the University of Leipzig to work on her project "Malevich's Reception in East-Central Europe." Forgacs published a review of Robin Schuldenfrei, Jeffrey Saletnik, eds., Bauhaus Construct in Design Issues, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, Winter 2011; and essays including "Du gibst uns zu essen und deswgen kämpfen wir gegen dich" Csilla Csorba, hrsg, Lajos Kassák, "Botschafter der Avantgarde 1915-1927," Ausstellungskatalog, Berlinische Galerie, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 2011; " 'Today is a Beautiful Day' The 'New Sensibility' or 'New Subjectivism' in the Hungarian Post-Avant-Garde of the1980s" Umeni/Art Vol. LIX, no. 3-4/2011; "Competing Narratives. Art Criticism and Art History of Modernist and Contemporary Hungarian Art of the 1960s" Centropa, Vol. 11, No.2, May 2011; "Between the Town and the Gown. Hannes Meyer's Dismissal from the Bauhaus" Journal of Design History, August, 2010.
Keith Holz (Associate Professor of Art History, Western Illinois University) delivered the keynote lecture “International responses to the Great German Art Exhibitions: the birth of the historiography of National Socialist Art?” at Die Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellungen 1937-1944/45. Veranstaltet vom Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München, und Haus der Kunst München, 20-21 October 2011. This symposium marked the launching of the new documentary-research website for the Great German Art Exhibitions (1937—1944/45): http://www.gdk-research.de/db/apsisa.dll/ete
Holz also presented ‘Westheim, Kokoschka, Weidler und die Ausstellung ‘20th Century German Art’ London, 1938’ Deutschen Historischen Institut in Moskau und dem Deutschen Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris, Wie das zweite Exil das erste zum Sprechen bringt: Moskauer Archive und die Künste in Paris 1933-1945, 23-24 June 2011; and “Exhibiting modern German art in London and Paris on the eve of war: public platforms or covert mechanisms to rescue private collections?“ in Exhibition Practices During War and Conflict, Association of Art Historians (UK), Annual Conference, 31 March–2 April, Warwick University, March 31 – April 2, 2011.
Holz published: “Max Silberberg’s commitment to modern art and Jewish culture in interwar Breslau.” Jewish Artists and Central-Eastern Europe: Art Centers – Identity – Heritage from the 19th century to the Second World War. Polish Society of Oriental Art. Edited by Professor Jerzy Malinowski, Renata Piatkowska, Tamara Sztyma-Knasiecka. Warsaw: DiG Publishers, 2010, 319-24.
Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History at DePaul University, is a visiting professor in the Program of Art History at the City University of New York Graduate Center for Fall 2011. Jaskot was also recently the inaugural Visiting Professor of the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont (March 2011).
Sharon Jordan has just begun a position as Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehman College, City University of New York. During 2010, she was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London.
Rose-Carol Washton Long presented lectures on “Is the Blaue Reiter Relevant for the Twenty-First Century?” at The Blue Rider Centenary Symposium, Tate Modern, London, November 26, 2011 and on “From Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit: Max Beckmann’s Print Portfolios” in the symposium, Disseminating Expressionism: The Role of Prints, 1905-1924, held at the Museum of Modern Art on May 6, 2011 in conjunction with the exhibition German Expressionism: the Graphic Impulse. She published “Modernity as Anti-Nostalgia: The Photograph Books of Tim Gidal and Moshe Vorobeiche and the Eastern European Shetl” in Ars Judaica 7(2011): 67-82; “Brücke, German Expressionism and the issue of modernism” in New Perspectives on Brucke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Ashgate, 2011).
Megan Luke has been appointed an Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Southern California. Her first book, Exiled Images: The Late Work of Kurt Schwitters is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She is also the editor of the first English edition of the collected critical and theoretical texts by Schwitters, Myself and My Aims, which will be translated by Timothy Grundy (also forthcoming from University of Chicago Press). In addition to articles on Adolf Behne and Gerrit Rietveld, she is currently working on a new book, Sculpture as Photograph: Surface, Color, Space, which investigates discussions about this intermedia relationship by art historians, critical theorists, and perceptual psychologists writing primarily in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Barbara McCloskey, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, now serves on the editorial board of German Studies Review and the fellowship review board for the Berlin Program. She presented her lecture “A Tale of Two Portraits: George Grosz’s Self-Portraits in the United States, 1936-45” at the German Studies Conference in Louisville, Kentucky in September 2011. She is in the process of completing a book-length study on the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the repatriation of exile culture to a divided Germany after the war.
Eleanor Moseman, Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University, curated the traveling exhibition "Drawing Inward: German Surrealist Richard Oelze." The exhibition will be hosted at Idaho State University in Pocatello from October 24 to November 18 (hosted by HGCEA member Linda Leeuwrik, Assistant Professor of Art History at ISU). The exhibition will be on view at University of Chicago's Smart Museum from June 19 until August 26, 2012. The exhibition connects Oelze's automatist writing to his uncanny landscapes, placing him in the post-war context of efforts at "working through" Germany's difficult past.
After finishing up a year as the Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Humanities Center, Elizabeth Otto was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (The University of Michigan Press), the book that she co-edited with Vanessa Rocco, was published in March and will be available in paperback early in 2012.
Clark V. Poling, Professor Emeritus, Emory University, was awarded the Alfred Heilbrun, Jr. Emeritus Fellowship for the academic year 2011-2012, from Emory University, for research on Alberto Giacometti and postwar Paris.
Vanessa Rocco is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute. She co-edited the volume The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). The book is already in its third reprint, and will convert to paperback in early 2012. Rocco authored two of its essays: the introduction “Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood,” with co-editor Elizabeth Otto, and “Bad Girls: The New Woman in Weimar Film Stills.” The New Woman was the subject of numerous panels this past spring, including one that Rocco moderated at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery on February 11. She presented the paper “Bad Girls” at a related panel at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Humanities March 17, as well as at a panel at the Barnard Center for Research on Women on March 28. She also gave a lecture on “Bad Girls” as part of the Live/Art/History series at the Savannah College of Art and Design on April 20.
Andrzej Szczerski has recently co-curated (together with David Crowley and Zofia Machnicka) an exhibition of Polish modern and contemporary art entitled "The Power of Fantasy. Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland" in Palais des Beaux-Arts BOZAR in Brussles, Belgium (24.06.11-18.09.11). The exhibition was organized by Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, National Museum in Kraków, Polish Institute in Brussels and BOZAR in Brussels, as part of cultural program of the Polish Presidency in the EU Council 2011. It featured nearly 200 works from public and private collections worldwide, including major artworks of the late 19th and 20th century by Jacek Malczewski, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Andrzej Wroblewski, Tadeusz Kantor and extensive selection of Polish post-1989 art with works by Pawel Althamer, Wojciech Bakowski, Miroslaw Balka, Zofia Kulik, Paulina Olowska, Wilhelm Sasnal, Monika Sosnowska and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski and others.
The exhibition is accompanied by lavishly illustrated catalogue in English, edited by the three curators, with essays by David Crowley, Gabriela Switek and Andrzej Szczerski, published by PRESTEL and BOZAR Books ISBN 978-3-7913-6365-3 (Bozar edition) ISBN 978-3-7913-5145-2 (Prestel edition)
Recent and forthcoming publications authored by Brett M. Van Hoesen, University of Nevada, Reno, include: “Who Knows Tomorrow: Berlin and Beyond” (exhibition review), Nka – Journal for Contemporary African Art, v. 28 (September 2011): 76-85; "Sound Art- New Only in Name: A Selected History of German Sound Works from the Last Century" (co-authored with Jean-Paul Perrotte) in Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century, Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill (eds.) (Oxford, 2012); and, “Visualizing the Enemy: Weimar Postcolonial Politics and the Rhineland Controversy” in German Cultures of Colonialism: Race, Nation and Globalization, 1884-1945, Geoff Eley and Bradley D.Naranch (eds.) (Duke, 2012). Her recent and forthcoming conference papers include: “Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism: Constructing the Weimar New Woman out of a Colonial Imaginary,” The International New Woman conference, SUNY Buffalo (September 2011); “Weimar Postcolonialism and the Popular Press: Richard Huelsenbeck and Der Querschnitt” for the panel, Generations of Post-Colonialism: Transmitting Colonialism in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and West Germany, Social Science History Association conference (Boston, November 2011); and, “The Culture of Critique?: Avant-Garde and Popular Press Photomontage in the Age of Weimar Postcolonialism,” conference on Weimar Colonialism hosted by the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (April 2012).
Maria Elena Versari, Assistant Professor of Modern European Art and Architecture at the University of North Florida, has contributed an essay titled "Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of Futurismin Eastern and Central Europe" to the upcoming first volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, edited by Günther Berghaus (De Gruyter, 2011).