Newsletter Spring 2009 Numbernumber 3 6 Spring 2012
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ART HISTORY PROGRAM Newsletter Spring 2009 NumberNumber 3 6 Spring 2012 DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT CONTENTS but we have time to work on it. Art History’s biggest achievement in Ming Dynasty originalist and art The search for a museum director Features 2-5 2011-12 is the recruitment of UC theorist Dong Qichang. is in progress. Dean Owens report- Davis’s first American Council of ed that a 2016 opening date is en- Learned Societies New Faculty Fel- The endowment gift from Alan tirely realistic. Many of our gradu- low. Seth Adam Hindin will become Templeton ’82 sponsored a highly ate and undergraduate students are Faculty News 6-9 Visiting Assistant Professor of Art successful symposium in the fall interested in museum careers. As a History (see p. 7 for his biography). (see p. 2). It supported research laboratory for art history study, the This fall quarter he’ll teach a seminar, travel for two of this year’s M.A. Shrem Museum will transform what “The Medieval and Early Modern graduates, Sheena Campbell and the campus can offer them. Undergraduate News 10 City, 300 -1600,” and an upper divi- Kamal Zargar, and on top of that sion course on Gothic art and archi- paid the registration fees for nearly Four undergraduate majors, Megan tecture. Next winter, he will teach all the graduate students to attend Friel, Elizabeth Mathews, Mariana the Medieval to Renaissance art the College Art Association annual Moscoso, and Brittany Royer, com- Graduate News 11-14 survey. Our Art History faculty, grad meeting in Los Angeles. The Tem- pleted senior honors theses. Hon- students and medievalist colleagues pleton fund will continue to sup- ors theses are very demanding and showed off our vibrant scholarly port student research travel and it a great credit to those who take community (I’m boasting) and we will contribute to our October 5th them on. Mariana won a highly Alumni News 14-15 owe ourselves congratulations. colloquium on Japanese art (see p. competitive President’s Undergrad- 16). uate Research Fellowship to visit an We are also extremely happy to host exhibition in Italy as part of her a Research Associate for 2012-13. Early this year Dean Jessie Ann thesis research. The entire faculty Events and Lectures 16 Dr. Ma Linfei is Professor of Art Owens announced the naming gift congratulates them and the impres- History at Renmin University of for UC Davis’s planned art muse- sively large group of graduating China, Beijing. Her visit is sponsored um: the Jan Shrem and Maria seniors who received Certificates by the China Scholarship Council. Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. The of Distinguished Performance in the She will conduct research on the late news was almost too big to take in, major (see p. 10). I can’t end without a heartfelt thanks to Leah Theis and Lisa Zdyb- The AHI Program wishes el in the Visual Resources Facility. to extend a welcome to a They are mainstays to our course class of seven incoming preparation and to student re- graduate students: search projects. This year they have worked intensively to help digitize courses in Japanese art, British art, and Impressionism. They have con- tinued to adapt the VRF itself to the Nicole Budrovich students’ evolving needs as we Erin Dorn learn to use Everson Hall. Alicia Guerra Finally, an administrative note: this is my last message as Director of Megan Kuehn Art History—because beginning July 1, I will be Vice Chair for Art Histo- Margaret Larimer The Arts and Humanities at UC Davis increasingly depend on ry in the Department of Art and Mariana Moscoso support from alumni and friends. Help create a buoyant future Art History. Our operations will be for Art History and all that it offers to cultural education, the same. Our name, however, will Amanda Roth professional development, and the spirit of inquiry agree with what the Academic so necessary to meaningful life. Senate calls us, and the Dean’s administrative structure will look more compact. To make online donations to the Art History Program go to: —Jeffrey Ruda giving.ucdavis.edu/DeptArtandArtHistory/ArtHistory Spring 2012 Page 2 FEATURES When Globalization of Art Began “Global art” is not only a different priced commodities such as pepper, silk, pearls, term, it offers a different concept of and diamonds. The Dutch East India Company how art develops, because it implies became an important presence; its warehouses contact across the world. Globaliza- appear in Vermeer’s View of Delft of 1658-60. tion of art began very early, Kauf- mann noted. For example, Sumerian Not only did the Dutch acclimate quickly to im- cylinder seals of the late 3rd millenni- ports from China, the presence of those goods um B.C.E. made use of lapis lazuli, a changed Dutch society. By the later seventeenth distant import, as did ancient Egyptian century, porcelain’s desirability was reflected in royal jewelry. Ivory tusks from Africa paintings that featured the gamut of luxury goods. appeared in ancient China, and silk Images such as Wilhelm Kalf’s Still Life with Nautilus from Asia was used in making the Cup suggest that desire itself became a subject of coronation mantle of the Holy Ro- man Emperor in 1133. European print culture after 1500 exemplified how objects and ideas were being disseminated through Tim Brook (left) and Tom Kaufmann (center) with Alan Templeton global exchange. Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 Rhinoceros not only illustrates evidence of German trade with India, Thanks to income from a major gift last year by the print itself became an object of international Alan Templeton (B.A. 1982), the Art History trade, for it was exported as far away as Latin Program was able to mount an important collo- America. Conversely, German decorative forms quium, Art between Europe and East Asia in the First migrated to India. And Europeans even facilitated Age of Global Trade on September 30, 2011. The the circulation of nonwestern goods through venue, the large lecture room in the Art Building Asia. The Portuguese, for example, transported (Room 217), barely held the standing-room-only Japanese lacquer boxes to India. audience of ninety-five, which included faculty and students from UC Berkeley and CSU Sacramento as well as students, faculty, and alumni from across UC Davis. The gathering featured two noted scholars who considered the effects of world trade on art from two different points of view. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick art. Brook also proposed that porcelains and oth- Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, er objects of trans-Pacific trade gave a new status Princeton University, offered “Reflections on to their owners—that of worldliness, and that the World Art History.” Timothy Brook, Professor, prevalence of porcelain in homes redefined the Institute of Asian Research, University of British domestic environment. Homes as well as their Columbia, spoke on “China on Vermeer’s Table: inhabitants came to be associated with decora- The Cultural Impact of Early Global Trade.” The tiveness, even as the demand for porcelain stimu- speakers were introduced by Professors Jeffrey lated industrial processes that strove to bring local Ruda and Katharine Burnett, the Art History ceramics manufacture up to the Chinese standard. faculty who organized the event. An engaging It is specious to claim that the art of the world question-and-answer period kept a significant was ever homogenous, warned Kaufmann. Nor During the question and answer period, the portion of the audience well past the posted would it ever be useful to define “global art” speakers agreed that trade, which inevitably leads ending time, a tribute to the timeliness of the solely according to qualities that all regions of the to borrowing, appropriation, and adaptation, colloquium’s topic. world have in common. Instead, networks are the counters any notion that art anywhere can be way to think of globalization. And in any period, “pure.” Nothing is “quintessentially” anything, not Professor Kaufmann described compellingly how networks of trade result in dialogue, appreciation, even Chinese porcelain, since the cobalt to color historians should treat globalization. He began by personal and cultural enrichment. it was itself an import to China. Yet Chinese explaining how the European “master narrative” porcelain in Holland was not like that in China of art history (that artistic development began in Professor Timothy Brook’s remarks focused on itself. Professor Patricia Berger from UC Berkeley the classical world and continued through the the effect of trade with China in Holland in the cautioned that the Chinese should not be pre- Middle Ages to the Renaissance and modern era) 1600s, when regular circuits of exchange devel- sumed to have exported what they valued: “No established a way of thinking about all artistic oped. Chinese goods were valued by the Dutch Chinese of any taste would be caught dead using development. Many histories of “world art” have as signs of luxury and wealth. What is surprising any of the porcelains that were exported to Eu- only reinforced the Eurocentric approach by is their proliferation. During the seventeenth rope. What Europeans wanted from China was treating art’s development in other parts of the century, 300 million pieces of porcelain came to based on an idea that was created by the Chinese world as similarly self-contained and dependent the Netherlands. Porcelain was brought to Dutch as to what Europeans would like to buy.” DS on “centers of influence.” cities in the same ships that carried other high- Spring 2012 Page 3 FEATURES Taking a Measure of Thrace What most surprised the students? For Laura, it was “the density of the forest and the scale of the rock-faces where we were working.” Ann-Catrin hardly expected “to encounter such a wealth of interesting and diverse sites in the area.