“The Quarantine Question” on Art Journal Open

For their post on Art Journal Open, “The Quarantine Question,” guest editors Dana E. Katz and Lisa Pon asked colleagues—historians of art, architecture, landscape, and culture; visual artists and musician-musicologists; curators and museum educators—to answer the following question as of summer 2021: “How has the past year’s quarantine affected your professional life?”

An introductory essay frames the twenty-one responses received by the editors. It draws on the plague hospitals and ghetto of early modern Venice to provide historical context for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, especially for the social-distancing measures taken to mitigate its effects. The contributions that follow afford a mosaic of perspectives on what one of the contributors refers to as l’époque covidienne. They range from discussions of art projects sparked by the pandemic to rich descriptions of COVID’s personal and professional impacts—and the difficulty of disentangling them. Read the article here.

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.

Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.

The comprehensive collection of prints by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677) donated by Sidney T. Fisher to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto ranks alongside the collections in London, Prague and Windsor. Based on the extensive unpublished correspondence between Sidney Fisher and Richard Pennington preserved in Toronto, this article describes the formation of Fisher’s Hollar collection and Pennington’s work towards ‘A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607–1677’ (Cambridge, 1982). The activities of Pennington as an agent for Fisher and his dealings with Cambridge University Press are also detailed.

The Liefrinck family was a Netherlandish dynasty of printmakers that consisted of three generations and was active for over a century. From c. 1500 until the turn of the seventeenth century various family members were involved in printmaking and publishing, producing a highly diverse output. This fully illustrated, two-volume catalogue brings together almost 400 woodcuts, etchings and engravings, including dozens of undescribed prints, states and editions. Edited by Huigen Leeflang.

Walter Benjamin famously argued that the mass public of the twentieth century would necessarily correlate with a newly politicized art. But the world has changed considerably since Benjamin’s article was written, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer already were assessing less than a decade later. It is the purpose of this article to examine how the aesthetics of the Frankfurt school, though frequently still invoked, have lost some of their immediate relevance. The anti-establishment phase of the 60s, compounded by a pronounced taste for irony, rendered aura and exhibition outmoded values, while on the other hand, more recently, price escalation in the art market and digitization have made certain of the Frankfurt school arguments more pertinent than ever. Taking as examples Goldsworthy and Kentridge, this essay argues that a deliberate loosening of the artist’s control over both medium and reception displaces the warmed-over religious responses endorsed by Benjamin, positing instead increased intellectual agency on the part of viewers, whose identity as a mass public has become newly complicated.

This book is the first illustrated study of the life and work of J. Alphege Brewer (1881-1946), the early 20th-century British artist who made his fame producing large, color etchings of European cathedrals and other historical buildings damaged or threatened during WWI. In both the United States and Great Britain, these etchings and reproductions were proudly hung on parlor walls in solidarity with the Allied cause and as a remembrance of the devastating cultural losses inflicted by the onslaught of war. Brewer's "à la poupée" technique, carried out in his studio workshop in Acton with the assistance of family members, required the plate to be painted entirely anew for each of the authorized 300-500 impressions. With the same "dab hand" at the end of his life, Brewer produced exquisite woodcuts of lakes, mountains, and other pastoral views. Chapters on Brewer's life story, techniques, and the artistic context for his war etchings are included, as well as a catalog of his known etchings. For more information and links to outlets where the book may be ordered, visit www.jalphegebrewer.info/etched-in-memory.

Formed in Chicago in 1968, AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) dedicated itself to producing art for Black people independent of white-controlled museums and markets. Examining business records from the Archives of American Art’s Jeff Donaldson Papers, this essay contributes to recent conversations about Black collectivity by exploring how AfriCOBRA navigated capitalism to sustain its revolutionary art practice. In doing so, I argue for the significance of AfriCOBRA as a political economy: a system for producing and distributing Black culture.

Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination explores the role of biblical imagery in modernity through the lens of Gustave Doré (1832-83), whose work is among the most reproduced and adapted scriptural imagery in the history of Judeo-Christianity. First published in France in late 1865, Doré's Bible illustrations received widespread critical acclaim among both religious and lay audiences, and the next several decades saw unprecedented dissemination of the images on an international scale. In 1868, the Doré Gallery opened in London, featuring monumental religious paintings that drew 2.5 million visitors over the course of a quarter-century; when the gallery's holdings travelled to the United States in 1892, exhibitions at venues like the Art Institute of Chicago drew record crowds. The United States saw the most creative appropriations of Doré's images among a plethora of media, from prayer cards and magic lantern slides to massive stained-glass windows and the spectacular epic films of Cecile B. DeMille.

This book repositions biblical imagery at the center of modernity, an era that has often been defined through a process of secularization, and argues that Doré's biblical imagery negotiated the challenges of visualizing the Bible for modern audiences in both sacred and secular contexts. A set of texts whose veracity and authority were under unprecedented scrutiny in this period, the Bible was at the center of a range of historical, theological, and cultural debates. Gustave Doré is at the nexus of these narratives, as his work established the most pervasive visual language for biblical imagery in the past two and a half centuries, and constitutes the means by which the Bible has persistently been translated visually.

Published to coincide with "Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty," Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (15 Sept 2021 - 18 Apr 2022) which celebrates Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcut works. Sarah Kirk Hanley looks at how the artist’s technical innovations changed the world of printmaking and reassesses her masterful contribution to woodcut. There was an associated online talk with Phil Sanders for his "Prints and Their Makers" Book Club on September 16, 2021. We discuss the recent criticism that places Frankenthaler more centrally in the canon of late 20th Century art on a par with her male peers. We also discuss what makes an artist great, and how the contributions of women should generally be reconsidered in this regard.