2011 Annual Report - National Gallery of Art

The Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts, founded in 1979, sponsors the
study of the visual arts in each of its four
program areas: fellowships, publications,
scholarly meetings, and research.
During its thirty-first academic year, the
Center welcomed fellows from France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland,
the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The topics of their research ranged from
votive panel paintings in Renaissance Italy to
the lives of ancient Maya sculptures, from
scenes of Arcadia to images of the Passion,
from a social history of the London square to
the historiography of Leonardo da Vinci, and
from the topographical imaging of Udaipur,
India, and its environs to the sculpture of
Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn.
In the program of publications, two volumes
in the series Studies in the History of
Art appeared. The first, Romare Bearden,
American Modernist (volume 71), was edited
by Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. It
includes essays delivered at the 2003 symposium
of the same name, which coincided
with the exhibition The Art of Romare
Bearden. The publication was marked by a
lecture by noted Bearden scholar Mary
Schmidt Campbell, dean, Tisch School of
the Arts, New York University. The second
publication, Art and the Early Photographic
Album (volume 77), was edited by Stephen
Bann, and gathers papers presented at a
symposium held in 2007.
In the program of special meetings, the
Center cosponsored, with University of
Maryland, the forty-first Middle Atlantic
Symposium in the History of Art. This
year’s biennial Wyeth conference, supported
by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art,
was dedicated to the topic “Landscape in
American Art, 1940–2000.”
Victor I. Stoichita, the Center’s eighth
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, initiated
two events during his residency this spring; a
two-day Robert H. Smith Colloquy on the
subject of the Gallery’s painting Two Women at
a Window by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and a
lecture for the scholarly public entitled “The
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 37
CENTER FOR ADVANCED
STUDY IN THE VISUAL ARTS
Don Quixote Effect: Pictorial Fiction and
Aesthetic Borders in Murillo and Beyond.”
The sixtieth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the
Fine Arts were delivered by Mary Beard of
the University of Cambridge on “The
Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from
Ancient Rome to Salvador Dalí.” Helen
Vendler’s A. W. Mellon Lectures, the fiftysixth
in the series, and Mary Miller’s, the
fifty-ninth in the series, were made available
as podcasts (www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon).
The Center is working to make the Mellon
Lectures more widely available this way, and
plans to include images to the extent possible.
The Moment of Caravaggio, based on
Michael Fried’s A. W. Mellon Lectures, the
fifty-first in the series, appeared in print.
Edited, revised, and fully illustrated versions
of the Mellon Lectures will continue to be
published in the Bollingen Series by
Princeton University Press, according to the
wishes of Paul and Mary Mellon.
The Center’s ongoing research projects
are designed to provide primary research
materials and tools. Dean Elizabeth Cropper
continued her work on the critical edition
and translation of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s
Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678). Keywords in
American Landscape Design, directed by
Associate Dean Therese O’Malley, and published
in 2010 jointly by Yale University
Press and the Gallery, was awarded the 2011
John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from
the Foundation for Landscape Studies. The
volume also received a 2011 Council on
Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Award
for a Significant Work in Botanical or
Horticultural Literature.
With the support of a Digital Resources
Grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation,
Associate Dean Peter M. Lukehart traveled to
Europe and throughout the United States to
present his digital humanities project, “The
History of the Accademia di San Luca, c.
1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di
Stato di Roma” (www.nga.gov/casva/accademia).
For more on the Center’s programs, see
the annual report, Center 31, available
online at www.nga.gov/resources/casva.shtm.