WILLIAMS G RADUATE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF ART OFFERED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CLARK ACADEMIC YEAR 2011–12 Newsletter MARC GOTLIEB CLASS OF 1955 MEMORIAL PROFESSOR OF ART Letter from the Director Greetings from Williamstown. I The coming year will see new, special programming designed hope that you enjoy this year’s to bring alumni together for discussion and debate. These in- newsletter, from its features on our clude a reunion event at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, current program, students, and fac- on Venting Monday, February 4—please mark your calendars ulty, to its updates on alumni across and stay tuned for additional information in the months ahead. the world. The past academic year From academics to internships, we continue to work closely with has seen substantial changes to the program’s urban fabric: the our partners—the Clark, the Williams Art Department, WCMA, Clark galleries in partial shutdown as the museum’s expansion MASS MoCA, and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center—in gains form on a daily basis, Chapin Library in partial shutdown our efforts to bring to our students, now as then, a transforma- with the renovation of Stetson Hall, and a new College library in tive intellectual experience. the works (the old Sawyer library will eventually be torn down). What is not on partial shutdown, needless to add, is the incred- ible level of activity of all those who occupy these new buildings (or buildings-in-the-making), from curatorial and research staff to the Graduate Program’s students and faculty. Amidst cranes, hard-hats, and the bustle of work-place construction, it’s full steam ahead for our academic programs, including new courses aena B on photography in the Middle East, Utopias Then and Now, Re- naissance Time, and many other thematic and historically based classes designed to plunge students into the now globalized art photo: Juan historical community that gathers here in the leafy precincts of the Northern Berkshires. Members of the Class of 2012 on the day of their Graduate Student Spring Symposium Back row: Alan Hirsch, Caitlin Condell, Ed Lessard, James Pilgrim, Lucie Steinberg, Zoë Samels, Susannah Blair, Jaimee Comstock-Skipp, and Jesse Feiman; Front row: Christianna Bonin, Ashley Lazevnick, and Alexandra Nemerov 4 Faculty & Staff News Congratulations to the Class of 2012! 10 GP News & Events 12 GP & Conferences 12 January Study Trip 15 Commencement 17 Students’ News 23 GP & The Clark 27 GP & WCMA 29 GP & MASS MoCA 31 GP & WACC 33 Grads’ News NICOLE DESROSIERS “Thanks to a hard working, com- and punitions of Poilâne, the sumptuous offerings of the mitted and engaged group of students I will remember this Biologique Marché Raspail on Sunday mornings, and the ACADEMIC YEAR 2010-11 year as one of great success. I also greatly appreciated the superb gelato at Grom, Le Bac à Glaces, and Pozzetto, not growth opportunities offered by the Clark—its exhibits and to mention the chocolatier Jean-Charles Rochoux. Georges Faculty and Staff News lectures were excellent. Another highlight of the year was Larnicol drew us in from the street with its window bins teaching two independent studies, one on Albert Camus’s overflowing with little Breton butter cakes. We took in fiction in the fall and the other, in the spring, supervising the art in the spectacularly revamped galleries at Musée the translation of Alfred de Musset’s play On ne badine pas d’Orsay, Artemisia at the Maillol, Matisse at the Pompi- JAY CLARKE“Last summer was a productive one work- lectured on “Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous: Sterling and Fran- avec l’amour, which I hope will eventually be staged.” dou, and Sempé and Doisneau at the Mairie de Paris. The ing with Sarah Hammond ’08 and Susannah Blair ’12 on cine Clark” at the Royal Academy. weather was glorious; we varied our pace by taking the the publication Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The The Clark’s five-year initiative with China culminated SAMUEL Y. EDGERTON “This past year, my 85th, found TGV to Switzerland and Lyon to visit friends, and made Manton Collection of British Art (Clark/Yale, 2012). We with two exhibitions in Williamstown: Unearthed: Re- me actually becoming busier again. Things began to get ac- sure, back in Paris, to spend at least one full afternoon worked as a team to research, edit, and edit again the nine cent Archaeological Discoveries from China and Through tive already during the spring and summer of 2011 when I sprawled in the chairs of the Luxembourg Gardens ‘read- essays and a collection checklist of 302 objects before the Shên-kan: Sterling Clark in China. Each commemorated served as a session chair at the annual Renaissance Society ing’ in the warmth of the spring sun.” book was handed off to the talented Pub- the 100th anniversary of the 1912 publication of Sterling of America March meeting in Montreal, and then with my lications Department. Once that book was Clark’s record of his 1908–09 expedition to Northern wife, Dottie, led a Williams Alumni Tour of Chicago dur- MARK HAXTHAUSEN “I have had a busy year of diverse put to bed, I began to teach the graduate China. The initiative began in 2008 with six installations ing August, ogling everything from the early steel-frame activities. Carl Einstein, the German critic and theorist I seminar ‘Approaches to Drawings from of Clark expedition photographs in China where gifts skyscrapers, F. L.Wright’s Oak Park houses, the fabulous have been translating and writing on over the past decade, Connoisseurship to Conceptualism,’ a class of original copies of Clark’s publications were given to Art Institute and water-spitting Crown Fountain in Mil- was the subject of special journal issues that appeared in populated by a talented group of first-year regional libraries along the expedition route. In 2010, a lennium Park, the Magnificent Mile featuring Marilyn France and Portugal, and I contributed to both. In Novem- students. The spring also brought a flurry of Chinese translation of Through Shên-kan was completed Monroe’s twenty-six-foot-high up-skirt statue, and even ber my article ‘Art, agentivité, et collectivité’ appeared in activity when I gave two lectures: by Hongshuai Shi, and a four-part television series on the Al Capone’s North Clark Street crime scenes. Beginning Gradhiva, the house journal of the Musée du Quai Branly one at Sage College on ‘Photography and Dis- Clark expedition aired on Chinese CCTV. The route was in 2012, I again served as a session chair during the March in Paris. In May, an earlier Einstein article from 2004, ‘Re- covery’ and at a Scandinavia House conference followed twice, first by three Oxford University students, RSA Meetings in Washington D.C., and finally sat down production/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,’ on ‘Landscape and Narrative in Munch’s Ameri- then by the Chinese photographer Li Ju, who retraced to do some writing. My review of Hans Belting’s new was published in Portuguese translation in Caleidoscópio can Reception.’ In June, an article I penned, Sterling Clark’s path three times in 2009-10, taking photo- book, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab 11/12 (2012). In the course of the academic year I pre- ‘Munch’s Puberty as Metabolic Moment,’ was graphs along the way. Li Ju’s contemporary photographs Science has just been published in the American Histori- sented a number of papers and public lectures. In August, published in an exhibition catalog at Oslo’s are juxtaposed with the Clark expedition’s photographs cal Review (April, 2012): 486-487. In the meantime, I’ve 2011, I spoke at the Clark on the treatment of time and Munch Museum.” in the book Through Shên-kan: Revisiting Loess Plateau, been commissioned by Oxford University Press to prepare space in the photographs of the contemporary German published in China in 2012 and available from the Clark an annotated bibliography of the historiography of linear photo artists Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, in con- MICHAEL CONFORTI Michael has continued to oversee Bookshop. Tom Loughman ’95 oversaw and made signifi- perspective from the Renaissance to Post-Modernism, a junction with an exhibition curated by Jay Clarke. In Oc- the Clark’s ongoing programs as well as its campus expan- cant contributions to Sterling Clark in China, a catalogue of project on which I’m now working and will occupy me for tober, at the University of Nagoya (Japan), I gave a paper sion. Over the past year significant progress was made on the second exhibition on view at Stone Hill Center this past the rest of this summer. As to the future if I’m still here in on ‘The Sovereignty of the Object’ at a conference on the that building and renovation program. Construction of the summer. October, I’m scheduled to give a lecture at the University campus as museum. My focus was the museum installation Tadao Ando designed Visitor, Exhibition, and Conference Over the course of the past year, Michael completed of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo. After that, I’ve signed as narrative, with the approaches taken in the recent rein- Center is progressing with new underground facilities and his term as chair of the Association of Art Museum Direc- a Free Will document ordering that whatever my condition stallation of the permanent collection at the Williams Col- a loading dock now operational. The Clark facilities will tor’s Nominating and Governance Committee and stepped the plug not be pulled till after November 7—and I should lege Museum of Art serving as my prime example.