New Audio and Video
The Sixty-Seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 2018
Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period
Hal Foster, Princeton University
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News
From the Bulletin
Prints and People: Carlo Cesare Malvasia's Catalog of Bolognese Prints Rediscovered (PDF 10.1MB)
Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678) is one of the most important early modern texts on Italian art. It both emulates and challenges Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550/1568) by providing a seventeenth-century Bolognese alternative. Despite its significance to the canon of art history, the Felsina pittrice has never been fully translated into English and there has not been a critical edition since 1841–1844. An article by Dean Elizabeth Cropper in the spring 2018 Bulletin discusses the most recent volume to be published in CASVA’s project to produce a critical edition, translation, and historical annotation of the text. This volume, which is dedicated to the life of the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi and includes Malvasia’s critical catalog of prints by or after Bolognese artists from Giulio Bonasone to Giovan Battista Pasqualini, deepens our understanding of Malvasia as a connoisseur of prints and situates him within the larger context of print collecting in early modern Europe.
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.
Recent Symposium
Boundary Trouble: The Self-Taught Artist and American Avant-Gardes
February 16 – 17, 2018
East Building Auditorium
Program (PDF 428KB)
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
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![Title: Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi at two years of age [Clarissa Strozzi im Alter von 2 Jahren]; Image ID: BERLIN_DB_10313748491](/content/ngaweb/research/casva/about-casva/casva-news/jcr%3acontent/parmain/textimage_1532433484/image.img.jpg/1521476621841.jpg "Title: Portrait of Clarissa Strozzi at two years of age [Clarissa Strozzi im Alter von 2 Jahren]; Image ID: BERLIN_DB_10313748491")
New Audio and Video
Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice? Titian's Portrait of Clarice Strozzi
Beverly Louise Brown, The Warburg Institute
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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 Video
Summer Lecture Series 2017
Behind the Scenes at the National Gallery: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
The history of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art is closely intertwined with that of the institution, and especially with the planning and design of the East Building. This richly illustrated lecture—delivered on August 6, 2017, by Dean Elizabeth Cropper—goes behind the scenes into the conception of a research institute housed at the Gallery and traces the development of the Center since its founding in 1980. Cropper looks at CASVA’s programs of fellowships, meetings, research, and publications and discusses the wider importance of research institutes today.
New Publication
Center 37: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2016–May 2017 (PDF 8.1 MB)
This year, in which the National Gallery of Art celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts welcomed fellows from Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The topics of their research ranged from depicting emotion in Archaic and Classical Greek art to post-apartheid photography in South Africa, from artistic developments during Rome’s “long” Trecento to picturing science in Chinese painting, and from the Italian painter Correggio to postwar modernist architecture in the United States.
New Audio and Video
Wyeth Foundation for American Art Symposium
Artists Panel: The African American Art World in Twentieth-Century Washington, DC
March 17, 2017
Eight distinguished artists discuss their careers and relationships as members of the Washington, DC, art world. Panelists are Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall. Ruth Fine, former curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, moderated the panel, which was part of a two-day symposium at the National Gallery of Art. The program was organized in collaboration with the Howard University Gallery of Art and was supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
Image: Alma Thomas, Red Rose Cantata, 1973. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Vincent Melzac
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 Publication
Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice: Lives of the Bolognese Painters, volume 2, part 2, Life of Marcantonio Raimondi and Critical Catalogue of Prints by or after Bolognese Masters, 2 volumes
Edited by Elizabeth Cropper and Lorenzo Pericolo; Critical Edition by Lorenzo Pericolo; Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Naoko Takahatake with the Critical Edition of Roger de Piles's Annotations to Malvasia's Festina Pittrice by Carlo Alberto Girotto; Illustration Volume with the Support of Mattia Biffis, 2017
Volume 2, part 2, technically dedicated to Marcantonio Raimondi, disengages surprisingly from the familiar biographical format. It includes the most detailed catalog of prints published in Europe before the eighteenth century. Following Malvasia’s descriptions, and hunting through many collections, Mattia Biffis and Naoko Takahatake have succeeded in identifying nearly 1,000 prints by and after Bolognese artists, many of them little known and in rare states. These are now reassembled in the volume of plates that accompanies Takahatake’s translation and notes, together with the critical edition by Lorenzo Pericolo and an essay on Roger De Piles by Carlo Alberto Girotto.
Learn more about the Malvasia Research Project.
New Publication
Chinese Painting and Its Audiences
Bollingen Series XXXV: 61
Craig Clunas, 2017
What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the 2012 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition.
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.