Upcoming Lecture
Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Andrea Mantegna’s Stones, Caves, and Clouds
Gabriele Finaldi, National Gallery, London
Sunday, December 8, 2:00 p.m.
West Building Lecture Hall
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From the Bulletin
Women in the Archive (PDF 423KB)
Biography is intrinsic to the field of art history with an extended and evolving tradition. Even so there remain inequalities in the study of artist’s lives, linked to factors such as gender or race. The many voids in the historical account will only be filled through dedicated research, especially the archival documentation of lived experience. An invaluable resource, the archive continues to enrich the biographies of hitherto underrepresented or little understood individuals, including many early modern women artists. An article by Dean Elizabeth Cropper in the fall 2019 Bulletin frames the painter Artemisia Gentileschi as a case study of how archival discoveries can bring new dimensions to the life and work of a woman artist in early modern Italy, revealing greater artistic agency and professional standing. Cropper places this in the context of ongoing research at CASVA that contributes to evaluating and expanding the biographies of both the famous and the forgotten.
New Publication
Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice: Lives of the Bolognese Painters, Volume 9, Life of Guido Reni, 2 volumes
Edited by Elizabeth Cropper and Lorenzo Pericolo; Critical Edition, Translation, and Essay by Lorenzo Pericolo; Historical Notes by Lorenzo Pericolo, with Elizabeth Cropper, Stefan Albl, Mattia Biffis, and Elise Ferone; Corpus of Illustrations established by Lorenzo Pericolo, with Mattia Biffis and Elise Ferone
Learn more about the Malvasia Research Project.
New Publication
Center 39: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2018–May 2019 (PDF 11.1MB)
This year the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts welcomed fellows from China, Georgia, Italy, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The topics of their research ranged from forgery and counterforgery in early modern Chinese art to the fifteenth-century Veronese painter Pisanello, from representations of Napoleon Bonaparte in French visual culture to agency in nineteenth-century Dakhóta art, and from transformation of Iberian images of the Virgin in early colonial Lima to fabric architecture of the imperial court in the late Ottoman empire. Read more
Announcing New Members
National Gallery of Art's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) Announces 2019–2020 Academic Year Appointments
See the press release for more information.
New Audio and Video
The Sixty-Eighth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Wu Hung, University of Chicago
Watch / Listen: The Emergence of Dynastic Time in Chinese Art
Watch / Listen: Reconfiguring the World: The First Emperor's Art Projects
Watch / Listen: Conflicting Temporalities: Heaven's Mandate and Its Antitheses
Watch / Listen: Miraculous Icons and Dynastic Time: Narrating Buddhist Art in Medieval China
Watch / Listen: Art of Absence: Voices of the Leftover Subject
Watch / Listen: End as Beginning: Dynastic Time and Revolution
Announcing 2020 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Transparence and Ambiguity: The Modern Space of Axonometry
Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
March 22, March 29, April 5, April 19, April 26, and May 3, at 2:00 p.m.
New Audio and Video
Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Against Titian
Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University
New Publication
Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812‒1820
Bollingen Series XXXV: 64
Thomas Crow, 2018
As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, which is based on his 2015 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna—with a close-up look at pivotal artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters François-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all were joined in a newly international network, from which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged out of the ruins of the old.
New Publication
The Artist in Edo
Studies in the History of Art, Volume 80
Edited by Yukio Lippit, 2018
A historic first showing outside Japan of the thirty-scroll series Colorful Realm of Living Beings (c. 1757–1766) at the National Gallery of Art was the occasion for this collection of twelve essays that reimagine the concepts of the artist and art-making as they were understood in early modern Japan. During the Edo period (1600–1868), peace and economic stability under the Tokugawa shogunate allowed both elite and popular arts and culture to flourish in Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The essays consider a wide range of art forms—screen paintings, scrolls, prints, illustrated books, calligraphy, ceramics, textiles—giving extended attention to works by artists such as Ogata Kōrin, Nagasawa Rosetsu, Hon’ami Kōetsu, Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Katsushika Hokusai, and others, including Itō Jakuchū, creator of the spectacular depiction of nature in Colorful Realm. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
New Audio and Video
Wyeth Lecture in American Art
The Panorama and the Globe: Expanding the American Landscape in World War II
Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine
Watch / Listen
New Audio and Video Series
Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts announces a new audio and video series, Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art. The four inaugural presentations include Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors Kathleen A. Foster, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Anna Ottani Cavina, and Carl Brandon Strehlke, who share their unique insights on works each selected from the National Gallery of Art collection. The presentations, ranging from five to 15 minutes in length, are a brief and special opportunity to take a closer look at important works inside gallery spaces with these distinguished professors.
New Publication
The Cubism Seminars
Seminar Papers, Volume 3
Edited by Harry Cooper, 2017
The complex facets of cubism remain relevant subjects in art history today, a century after Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed the revolutionary style. This collection of essays by international experts presents new lines of inquiry, including novel readings of individual objects or groups of works through close visual, material, and archival analysis; detailed studies of how cubism related to intellectual and political movements of the early 20th century; and accounts of crucial moments in the reception of cubism by curators, artists, and critics. Generous illustrations of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some familiar but others virtually unknown, support this wide range of approaches to the pioneering works of Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and others. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
New Endowment
$1 Million Received by the National Gallery of Art from the Edmond J. Safra Foundation to Endow the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
The National Gallery of Art announced a $1 million grant from the Edmond J. Safra Foundation to support the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship at CASVA. This generous gift coincides with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's endowment challenge grant to the National Gallery of Art on the occasion of the Gallery's 75th anniversary. Matching funds will permit the professorship to be fully endowed. See the press release for more information.