Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, January 24, 2018 in Events, HART, News, VRC.

HART Professors Leonard Folgarait and Kevin Murphy were among those honored at a recent reception at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in celebration of 2017 faculty book publications in the humanities and social sciences.

Folgarait, Distinguished Professor of History of Art, wrote Painting 1909: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson, Comics, Albert Einstein, and Anarchy, which was published last year by Yale University Press. In 1909 Pablo Picasso embarked on a series of stylistic experiments that had a dramatic effect on modern art. This book examines the ways in which Picasso’s art of 1909 intertwines and engages with the larger intellectual framework of his time and sheds light on how the writings of Gertrude Stein, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the theories of Albert Einstein, and even American comic strips played a role in the development of Picasso’s unique artistic style.

With an insightful, interdisciplinary approach that focuses on how European society was grappling with the larger issues of how to conceptualize, write about, and visualize a rapidly modernizing culture, Painting 1909 presents a methodical exploration of Picasso’s stylistic choices and proposes new reasons for the development of radical modernist art that led to Cubism and, eventually, absolute abstraction.

Kevin Murphy, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of History of Art, co-edited (with Lisa Reilly) Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings, published in 2017 by the University of Virginia Press. He also wrote American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson for a 2017 student-curated exhibition at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, which was distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Of all building types, the skyscraper strikes observers as the most modern, in terms not only of height but also of boldness, scale, ingenuity, and daring. As a phenomenon born in late nineteenth-century America, it quickly became emblematic of New York, Chicago, and other major cities. Previous studies of these structures have tended to foreground examples of more evincing modernist approaches, while those with styles reminiscent of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were initially disparaged as being anti-modernist or were simply unacknowledged.

Skyscraper Gothic brings together a group of renowned scholars to address the medievalist skyscraper—from flying buttresses to dizzying spires; from the Chicago Tribune Tower to the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Murphy wrote about the Trinity and U.S. Realty Buildings

Morris Davidson (1898–1979) was an abstract painter, teacher, and writer with expansive interests that covered a wide range of approaches, and indeed a tenacious commitment to, abstract painting. American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson is the first comprehensive survey of a little known yet important twentieth-century American artist, presenting new research into the significance of his life’s work and using it as a lens to view many iterations of abstraction practiced from the 1930s through the 1970s.