Elain Harwood— It’s very easy to take England’s universities for granted, to think that just because Oxford and Cambridge are ancient the others must be too. In fact, most of the noble red-brick institutions in our provincial cities were developed after 1900, and their neo-Elizabethan towers owe more to those
Margot Maley– A few weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth began her summer holiday at Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish estate. Located in the northeast of Scotland about an hour west of Aberdeen, Balmoral has been a privately-owned vacation residence for the royal family since Prince Albert purchased the property for Queen
Rachel High– A new publication in the highly popular How to Read series, How to Read Chinese Ceramics, by Denise Patry Leidy, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art and an expert in the field, is perfect for students who want to learn more about this fascinating, centuries-old tradition and is
Art conservation offers a fascinating overlap between the worlds of art and science; conservators examine works of art using tools and methods such as microscopy, X-radiography, X-ray fluorescence, and infrared reflectography, and their insight informs decisions about how to preserve, clean, store, transport, and display the works. Here, Ian McClure,
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop is an exhibition opening tomorrow, Thursday, September 3rd, at the Harvard Art Museums. The Boston Globe recently published a piece in which Cate McQuaid whimsically proposes that if Don Draper and Mother Theresa had a love child, it would be Corita Kent. The exhibition
David Ebony— A latecomer to the art scene, Barnett Newman (1905-1970) held his first solo show in 1948, at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery. He made a formidable impact on the art world when he introduced in that show the controversial works for which he is best known today. Decried
For your reading pleasure (and it is a pleasure): a sneak preview of an exciting, forthcoming book by Helen Molesworth, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The book, Leap Before You Look, is a dynamic new look at the legendary Black Mountain College, a major incubator
Peter John Brownlee– Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic culminates nearly five years of collaboration and cross-cultural exchange. Featuring essays by 48 scholars from across the Americas, the book reflects the dialogic manner in which the exhibition and catalogue came together. Developed over the
Henk van Assen, in addition to being a marvelous, long-time collaborator as the designer of many books published and distributed by Yale University Press, is founding principal at HvADesign, senior critic at Yale University, and lecturer at Parsons the New School for Design. Read on for his adventurous, international, and
David Getsy’s new book, Abstract Bodies, is eye-opening; by applying the field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history, he offers a new and revelatory approach to long-standing debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art. The book focuses on works by four major artists: Dan Flavin, Nancy Grossman,