ALUMNI NEWSLETTER 2012- WILLIAMS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF ART 2013 OFFERED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CLARK NEWSLETTER ! 2013 Letter from the Director News from Williamstown Dear Alumni: alum in St. Louis and Houston last November, for a series of events I hope you enjoy our 2012-13 organized collaboratively with the Graduate Program Newsletter, which Williams College Museum of Art – beginning this year will be mailed out stay tuned for more events of this in January. As in years past, you will kind, including, once again, in New find in these pages news of the York, and possibly Washington D.C. program, its students, alumni, and I’m also delighted to note that our several special features that I hope listserv is back in action (not without will bring back smiles and memories. some hiccups!) –do send professional MARC GOTLIEB, CLASS OF 1995 With the Clark set to open its notices of interest to the program MEMORIAL PROFESSOR OF ART beautiful expansion this summer, a news to Betsy Athens, moderator. Its new Williams College library set to success depends on your open shortly after, and still other participation. developments on both campuses, rarely has Williamstown seen so much Finally, a special welcome, and change to its built environment. This thanks, to Kristen Oehlrich, year has also seen important changes newsletter editor and the graduate in our complement of faculty – note program’s new post-doctoral teaching inside these pages a wonderful profile fellow. Kristen joined us from Brown on Marc Simpson, teacher –many University, where she recently thanks to Amy Torbert, MA ’07 for completed a putting this feature together. Let me doctorate on also take the opportunity to welcome the American Darby English as new Starr Director photographer of the Clark’s Research and Walker Academic Program. And while saying Evans, with goodbye to Michael Holly as director particular of RAP was a melancholy burden attention to indeed, great teaching does not let go the —I’m delighted to announce that transatlantic Michael will join the graduate and literary program next academic year as connections Robert Sterling Clark Visiting in Evans’s Professor. early career. Kristen will Many of you participated in our be teaching graduate program alumni reunion in for us over New York, at the Museum of Modern the next three years—but not before Art, and featuring a panel on getting the newsletter out! “Building the Next Curator.” It was also a pleasure to see so many grad WILLIAMS COLLEGE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF ART, 2012-2013 http://gradart.williams.edu 2 Congratulations to the Class of 2013! The Class of 2013 on the day of their Graduate Student Symposium. Standing: John Witty, Natalie Dupêcher, Danielle Canter, Isabelle Gillet, Ginia Sweeney, Antongiulio Sorgini, Martha Joseph Seated: Elisabeth Lobkowicz, Sarah Mirseyedi, Elizabeth Rooklidge, Rebecca Goldstein, Cathy Zhu WILLIAMS COLLEGE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF ART, 2012-2013 http://gradart.williams.edu 2 ACADEMIC YEAR 2012-2013! Faculty and Staff News in Williamstown where it’s back home. I gave these along JAY A. CLARKE, MANTON CURATOR OF with co-investigator, Tom Loughman (MA ’95 and PRINTS, DRAWINGS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS Associate Director of the Clark Art Institute). This past year Jay co-curated The Impressionist Line from Degas Perhaps my most rewarding experience in 2013, however, to Toulouse-Lautrec (March 12 – June 16, 2013), which was on was the opportunity to relive the fiftieth anniversary of one view at the Frick Collection in New York. Jay also spoke at of the most fulfilling moments of my earlier life. This was a Scandinavia House conference in February of 2013 on to celebrate the historic month of August, 1963, when the “Landscape and Narrative in Munch’s American national movement to gain civil rights for African Reception.” In addition to editing The Impressionist Line, her Americans reached its moral apogee with the “March on other Washington for Jobs and Freedom” where Martin Luther publications King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. I was not only include: one of the fortunate two-hundred thousand attendees who "Puberty as heard that speech in situ , but was also a member of our Metabolic local Ardmore, Pennsylvania NAACP chapter, Moment," simultaneously engaged in trying to have an all black in Puberty elementary school desegregated, and its students re- (Munch dispersed among the far better serviced schools in white Museum, neighborhoods. Yes, school segregation did exist in the 2012); "Art north as well as the south (although only de facto by Equals Life: neighborhoods Munch and and not de jure)! the Problem And yes, we of even won the Biography," case when, Munch 150 almost during (National Museum and Munch Museum, 2013); and that very day "Cornelia Paczka-Wagner: Representing the Symbolic when Dr. King Self," Cantor Art Center Journal (Spring 2013). In the spring of had his dream 2013 Jay taught the graduate seminar "German in Expressionism: Art, Market, and Theory." Washington, the township SAMUEL Y. EDGERTON, AMOS LAWRENCE school board PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY EMERITUS acceded to all My Good 2013 Year our NAACP demands, and Yes, this was a good year for this elder retiree. Last winter I the old was able to finish a hefty Historiography of Linear Perspective dilapidated from the Renaissance to Post-Modernism for the Oxford school was University Press, which will be available on-line (by forthwith subscription) this coming January. This summer I spent closed and eventually razed. studying the Clark Museum’s suddenly famous Madonna Enthroned with Four Angels by Piero della Francesca. Three This local but equally historic anniversary was also public lectures were presented on the subject, first in New celebrated in September of this year, and I, actually the York where the painting was then on exhibition, and next last surviving member of the NAACP team which fought WILLIAMS COLLEGE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF ART, 2012-2013 http://gradart.williams.edu 4 NEWSLETTER! 2013 that battle, was honored to be invited. The occasion took conferences at Boston College and Emory University; in place appropriately on the parking lot where once stood the January I gave two lectures at the National Gallery of Art, old school. What a pleasure it was indeed to meet some of “Of Times and Spaces: On Looking at Thomas Struth and the now aging but original African American students who Candida Höfer,” and “On the Wall: Thoughts on Sol were also celebrating, and hear their stories of how the LeWitt”; in May, at a conference at the University of opportunity to attend integrated schools after 1963, Oregon, I presented “Expression, ‘Impressionism,’ allowed them to go on to college and attain successful ‘Expressionism’: A German Muddle.” careers . GUY HEDREEN All this began, by the way, because of the urging of Laura Coyle, MA ’86, now Curator of Collections of the new Two essays appeared in print over the course of the last Smithsonian Museum of African American History of Art academic year: “Vase-Painting and Narrative Logic: The and Culture in Washington, to which I was giving my Death of Troilos in Greece and Etruria,” in Red-Figure collection of artifacts from the March on Washington. It Iconography in its Ancient Setting: Acts of the International was she who connected me to the committee organizing the Colloquium held at the National Museum of Denmark in Ardmore affair, and started me, after fifty years, on my Copenhagen, November 5-6, 2009, ed. Stine Schierup and nostalgic journey down memory lane. Bodil Bundgaard Rasmussen (Gösta Enbom Monographs, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 134-146. And MARK HAXTHAUSEN “The Semantics of Processional Dithyramb: Pindar’s Second Dithyramb and Archaic Athenian Vase-Painting,” My academic year began with the opening of Sol LeWitt: in Dithyramb and Society: Texts and Contexts in a Changing Choral The Well-Tempered Grid, which I curated at the Williams World, edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson College Museum of Art in conjunction with a seminar I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 171-197. offered on LeWitt’s wall drawings. My first curatorial effort since the 1980s was greatly facilitated by the deft With Jas’ Elsner, Richard Neer, and Verity Platt, I co- coordination of Katie Price (’02) and my curatorial organized a colloquium, “The New Antiquity 3: assistant, Christianna Bonin (’12). Christianna and Conditions of Visibility,” which was held at Williams Erica Di College and the Clark Art Institute, April 19-20, 2013. I Benedetto gave the paper, “Boupalos and Athenis are Dead: Fictions (’09) each of Art History in Hipponax.” I also gave a paper, “The wrote Iambic Artist in the Kerameikos,” at the international splendid conference, “Athenian Potters and Painters III,” the essays for the College of William and Mary, September 14, 2012. catalog, which also I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete the included my writing of “I am Odysseus”: The Iambic Artist in Athenian Vase- own effort on Painting, Lyric Poetry, and Homeric Epic. I hope to complete LeWitt and this project during my sabbatical this year. music, focusing on his interest in J. S. Bach. Diane Gottardi’s stunning catalog design won awards from the PAUL PARK New York Book Show and The New England Museum Association, and the exhibition received the Award of I've got a few books this year: Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance Excellence for a university museum exhibition from the came out in a pretty, illustrated edition this spring. My Association of Art Museum Curators. Besides the LeWitt novel All Those Vanished Engines is coming out in early essay, I published two others in the course of the year: summer 2014—that's a story that got its start as the text of “‘Abstract with Memories’: Klee’s ’Auratic’ Pictures,” in : a permanent installation at Mass MoCa.