Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Department Celebrates HART Graduates at Reception and Awards Ceremony on May 11

History of Art majors and minors and their families and friends are invited to attend the department’s reception and awards ceremony for our graduating seniors on Thursday, May 11, from 2 to 4 pm. The event will be held in the atrium of Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus, and awards will be presented at 3 pm. Held in conjunction with the celebration of our graduates is the opening reception for a student-curated exhibition entitled American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson.

Graduates and their families are invited to view the current exhibits in the Fine Arts Gallery near the atrium from noon to 4:00 pm. American Modernism at Mid-Century is the first comprehensive survey of Morris Davidson, 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. 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.

On view in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery now through September 17, the exhibition is the fourth in a series of annual partnerships between the Fine Arts Gallery and the Department of History of Art. The exhibition is curated by Aiden Layer ’19, Nancy Lin ’18, Ryan Logie ’17, Cecilia March ’18, Kittredge Shamamian ’17, Elliot Taillon ’17, and Nina Vaswani ’18, who were students in the “Exhibiting Historical Art” class, taught this year by Kevin Murphy, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and chair of the Department of History of Art.

A second exhibit in the gallery, on view through May 27, is The Dada Effect: An Anti-Aesthetic and Its Influence, featuring works by artists whose imaginations were captured by the notion of anti-art for many decades, including Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. The Dada Effect shows how Dadaist aesthetics and ideology directly influenced modern art and literature through the twentieth century in many subsequent movements, including Surrealism, ‘Pataphysique, and Neo-Dada.

The gallery will be open on Commencement Day (Friday, May 12) from noon to 4 pm, and Saturday, May 13, from 1 to 5 pm. Gallery hours for the summer (now through August 22) are Tuesday-Friday, noon to 4 pm; and Saturday, 1-5 pm. The gallery will be closed on Sundays and Mondays during the summer.

Morris Davidson (American, 1898–1979). Untitled [Two Figures], oil on canvas, 1944. From the Rosenfeld/Davidson Family Collection

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 8, 2017 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Downing Recipient Ellen Dement Completes Research on HART and Library Projects in New York, Washington, DC

I visited Washington, DC, and New York City over the spring break thanks to the generosity of the Downing family and Vanderbilt’s History of Art department. During my trip I completed research for two projects, both supervised by Kevin Murphy, HART professor and department chair.

The first, my honors thesis, focuses on the Nashville Customs House and its architect, William Appleton Potter, who designed the building in 1875 as Supervising Architect of the Treasury. For this project, I visited the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and Washington, DC, where most of the original records on the building are located. I also visited Columbia University’s Avery Architectural Library, which houses records related to Potter’s private practice.

My trip also included research for my Vanderbilt Library Fellowship project, “Visualizing Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building.” The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery recently acquired more than 150 drawings of the Woolworth Building in New York City, which was the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1913. For my project I am creating a website that will contextualize these drawings within the larger body of sources on the Woolworth Building. I visited two other collections on the Woolworth Building at the Library of Congress and the New York Historical Society, and I had the amazing opportunity to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the entire Woolworth Building with the building’s manager, Roy Suskin.

When the archives were closed, I used that time to visit several art museums. In DC I went to the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and in New York I visited the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cloisters. It was my first time to visit these galleries, and it was wonderful to see works that I had studied in my art history classes. For instance, I am currently in a class on French art in the age of Louis XV, and at the Met I saw much of the decorative art that we have covered in that class.

This trip allowed me to find primary sources directly related to my projects that are not available online or through Vanderbilt’s library. Similarly, visiting the Woolworth Building in person provided a more holistic understanding of Vanderbilt’s collection of drawings and the building’s cultural significance in the history of New York. This trip is certainly one of the highlights of my Vanderbilt career, and I am immeasurably grateful to the Downing family for the opportunity.—Ellen Dement

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 3, 2017 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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“American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson” Exhibit Opens April 28

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.

On view in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery now through September 17, the exhibition is the fourth in a series of annual partnerships between the Fine Arts Gallery and the Department of History of Art. The exhibition is curated by Aiden Layer’19, Nancy Lin’18, Ryan Logie’17, Cecilia March’18, Kittredge Shamamian’17, Elliot Taillon’17, and Nina Vaswani’18, who were students in the “Exhibiting Historical Art” class, taught this year by Kevin Murphy, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and chair of the Department of History of Art.

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. On the tension between making money through portraiture and the pursuit of more “serious” painting, the artist wrote in the 1930s, “I had to get back to Cubist and semi-abstract works, but when my bell rang I could quickly put such painting in the extra room so that a portrait possibility would not be frightened off by the strange images of my experimental painting.” Seeking a resolution to this tension in later years, Davidson turned to teaching and writing for regular income. The freedom this allowed for his experiments in abstraction, creating works with greater attention to form, line, and color than subject, shows increasingly in his paintings of the following decades.

Davidson’s career as a painter spanned the decades in which American artists experimented with a wide variety of artistic expression—from social realism to abstraction. Davidson followed these trends in his own work as he studied art in Baltimore, at the Art Institute of Chicago, with painters in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and eventually in Paris. In an oral history conducted with Davidson by the Archives of American Art in 1971, the artist described the decisive impact that cubism and other modernist movements had on his thinking and painting. Along with many other mid-century artists, Davidson, in the course of his career, moved away from the depiction of identifiable landscapes or cityscapes and toward a greater degree of abstraction. The exhibit highlights the mature works of this post-war period.

Research for this exhibition and its companion catalogue demonstrate that many of the paintings included were first exhibited at these shows during the artist’s lifetime. Student research on the paintings and catalogue essays by noted art historians, Margaret Laster and Melissa Renn, bring Davidson’s paintings and importance to the art circles of mid-century into today’s light.

As Kevin Murphy states in the catalogue introduction, “That moment—from the interwar period through the 1960s—when Morris Davidson addressed the challenge of abstraction amid the appearance of many permutations of it in New York and Provincetown, is the focus of this [project].” The exhibition and catalogue together aim to construct a larger understanding of the many expressions of abstract painting in the United States at mid-century while expanding appreciation for this hitherto largely unrecognized artist.

The Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Gallery hours from April 28 to August 22 are Tuesday through Friday 12-4 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm, closed Sundays and Mondays. Gallery hours from August 23 through September 17 are Monday through Friday 11 am to 4 pm, weekends 1-5 pm. Admission is free and open to the public.

Thanks to a loan from a private collection that spans the entirety of Davidson’s career, the exhibition presents a body of evidence that has allowed the student curators to be the first to reconstruct Davidson’s development as a painter, demonstrating that his move from a social-realist idiom in his early work to abstraction by mid-century was informed by his contact with some of the foremost painters of his day.

Support has been provided by the Vice Provost for Academic and Strategic Affairs, the College of Arts and Science, the Department of History of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, the Ewers Gift for Fine Art, and the Rosenfeld-Davidson Family Archive.

For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

***Paintings by Morris Davidson (American, 1898–1979) from the Rosenfeld/Davidson Family Collection: Rockport [Bearskin Neck], watercolor on paper, 1939; Untitled [Still Life with Red Pitcher], oil on canvas, n.d.: and Untitled, oil on canvas, 1961.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 28, 2017 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Student Cites Art History Class as a Favorite in “Vanderbilt Hustler” Interview

Robert Schutt, a former student of HART professor Betsey Robinson, is currently a junior, but he’s planning to graduate a year early. He’s the editor of Vanderbilt Orbis, an environmentally-focused student publication. That’s not all, though—he is also a candidate for public office. Even though he is at the minimum age required to run, Schutt is pouring his time and energy into a bid for the 95th District seat (Shelby County) in the Tennessee House of Representatives. He discussed his ambitious attempt to run with Claire Barnett, a writer for The Vanderbilt Hustler, who sat down with him to get to know the person behind the candidate.

“I definitely want to work in environmental law, or consulting, something where I can have an impact on what I’m passionate about—agriculture and the environment,” he said. “My favorite class at Vanderbilt was either History of Western Architecture—art history classes are the best!—or Theories of Culture in Human Nature. I’ve used that knowledge for every other class that I’ve taken.”

In a “Letter from the Editor: November 2016,” Schutt wrote in the Vanderbilt Orbis: “As our university continues to grow, it is imperative that we continue to develop our commitment to sustainability and to recognize the formative impact we can have in the development of our city and our region. We have already pioneered sustainable initiatives as a Southern university, but we cannot stop here. We must always strive to be on the cutting edge of sustainability, and serve as a catalyst for change in the South.”

Likewise his Vanderbilt art history professor is committed to sustainability. Since 1997 Betsey Robinson, Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor of history of art, has conducted research at the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, focusing on water supply, architecture, and works of art in context. “Humanists and scientists, we are united by research interests in how water bodies and hydrological processes are affected by human activity and, in turn, how changing conditions impact society,” said Robinson. “We explore the power and possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration across time, around the world, and in diverse fields, from archaeology and art history to sociology and engineering.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 19, 2017 in HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Millie Fullmer Awarded Kress Foundation Scholarship to Attend SEI Workshop in June

Millie Fullmer, director of HART’s Visual Resources Center, has received a Kress Foundation scholarship to support her attendance at the 2017 Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, June 6-9.

The SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). SEI seeks to provide information professionals with a substantive educational and professional development opportunity focused on digital imaging, the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field, and the opportunity to create and be part of a network of supportive colleagues.

This intensive three and a half-day workshop features a curriculum that specifically addresses the requirements of today’s visual resources and image management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual property rights; digital imaging; metadata and cataloging; project management; professional growth and development; digital asset management, and the digital humanities.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 14, 2017 in Conferences, HART, Technology, VRC

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VRC Staff Reports On Highlights of Visual Resources Conference

At the end of March, I attended the Visual Resources Association’s 34th Annual Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, along with Visual Resources Center Director Millie Fullmer. This year’s conference theme was “Unbridled Opportunities”, a theme which played on the horse racing history of Kentucky but also addressed the rapid changes occurring in the visual resources field and how professionals can meet new challenges head-on.

This was my first professional conference and I appreciated that there were several sessions geared toward professionals in the early stages of their careers. One such session was “New Faces, New Voices: Emerging Professionals Lightning Round”, in which our own Millie Fullmer presented on the work we do in the Visual Resources Center. I was also fascinated by the presentation given by Purva Chawla, the founder of MaterialDriven, an online platform designed to address the visual resource needs of architects, designers, and artists. Many of us visual resources professionals work in university or museum settings, so Purva brought a refreshing entrepreneurial and business-oriented perspective to the session.

Two presenters in other sessions had special connections to Vanderbilt: Madeleine (Mickey) Casad, Coordinator of the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, discussed facilitating cross-departmental collaboration on campus; and Stephanie Schmidt, a former HART major and student worker in the department, discussed the challenge of building a corporate archive from the ground up at the Sazerac Company.

I also had a little free time to explore downtown Louisville. Between sessions I made a quick trip to the Speed Museum of Art adjacent to the University of Louisville’s campus. The museum is just a few miles from the conference hotel, but I was happy to discover that the route took me through a historic residential neighborhood called Old Louisville which is filled with grand Victorian houses. The Speed Museum itself is a spacious museum with a diverse collection on display. I was particularly charmed by the colorful gallery walls and the Art Sparks gallery, one of the coolest interactive learning galleries I’ve seen in an art museum.

The highlight of the conference was the fascinating convocation speech given by Brent Seales, Director of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky. Seales discussed his work developing cutting-edge digital imaging technology to create readable images from extremely fragile cultural heritage objects such as fire-damaged manuscripts and brittle papyrus scrolls. Seales framed his talk with the conference’s “Unbridled Opportunities” theme in mind: he advised the audience to learn from professional constraints; accept guidance and training from mentors; seek out and prepare for new challenges; and when the bridle comes off, be ready to run.

— Shelby Merritt

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 11, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, VRC

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Jeffrey Collins to Focus April 13 Goldberg Lecture on Development and Dispersal of Incense Boats

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the spread of European merchants and missionaries in pursuit of new territory was accompanied by an unprecedented tide of Western material culture, including objects and implements associated with Catholic Christianity. Among the most striking was the silver incense boat or navicula, typically crafted of silver and closely modeled on the oceangoing ships that brought them and their first owners and users to locations across the globe.

Jeffrey Collins, professor of 17th- and 18th-century art and culture, Bard Graduate Center, will address “Ship Shape: Incense Boats across the Early Modern Globe” in the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, April 13, at 4:10 pm in 203 Cohen Memorial Hall. A reception will be held afterward in the atrium.

“Encoding movement and exchange in their very form, and housing fragrant resins that were both a tool of evangelization and an international commodity, naviculae embody the spread of commerce and Christianity and suggest important links between the two,” wrote Collins. “My lecture investigates the development and worldwide dispersal of this distinctive ship-shaped form during the heyday of exploration and colonization, including its links to secular table vessels known as nefs. Just as important, more detailed study of specific examples from the Americas, Africa, and Asia suggests how seemingly ubiquitous and globalized objects may nonetheless have carried distinct and specific local meanings for the individuals and communities that made, used, or viewed them.”

Collins is an internationally respected specialist in the art, architecture, and visual culture of the global early modern era with an emphasis on Italian art and museology of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and the principal contributor to History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400-2000 (Yale University Press, 2013). His Goldberg lecture is part of a larger book project entitled The Global Republic of Sacred Things: The Circulation of Religious Art in the Early Modern World.

He has contributed to a wide array of exhibition catalogues and scholarly anthologies and in addition has published more than forty scholarly articles and book reviews. Collins has presented scores of invited lectures and symposium papers on four continents and has trained an impressive cadre of young scholars, both at Bard and at the University of Washington. Teaching interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, colonial Latin America, the Grand Tour, and the commemorative monument.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For more information, call the department at 615.322.2831.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 10, 2017 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Rebecca VanDiver Presents Talk at Denison University as Part of Vail Lecture Series

Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of history of art, presented a lecture on April 3 at Denison University, which was part of the Vail Lecture Series and sponsored by the Art History and Visual Culture Program. VanDiver addressed “States of Emergency: Water as Metaphor and Agent of Black Trauma in Kara Walker’s 2006 ‘After the Deluge’ and Charles Moore’s photographs of Birmingham, 1963.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 10, 2017 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Students of Betsey Robinson Present Papers at Undergraduate Writing Symposium on March 26

Students Cates Saleeby and Maggie Cassidy presented papers in the panel on “Meaning in the Ancient Italian Peninsula,” in the Undergraduate Writing Symposium held Sunday, March 26, in the Commons Center with reception afterward at the John Siegenthaler Center on the Peabody campus.

In “A City Decorated with Clues: An Exploration of Roman Graffiti,” Cassidy discussed the rhetorical structure of graffiti in public and private spaces, contrasting introspective and expressive affect and effects in private and public messaging in Pompeii.

Saleeby spoke on “Representations and Ritual: The Lararia of Pompeii’s Region IX,” summarizing a detailed study of the role of household shrines and religious rituals in maintaining familial and other social bonds. Both papers were originally produced for Betsey Robinson’s First-Year Writing Seminar, History of Art 1111: Pompeii: Life and Death of a Roman City.

Robinson, associate professor of history of art and of classical and Mediterranean studies, was delighted at the quality of her students’ work and the professionalism of their presentations: “I had a great group in last fall’s writing seminar, and the papers written by Cates and Maggie were among the very best. In the competition to participate in the Writing Symposium, they earned their places with papers that combined sophisticated thinking, careful research, and clear writing—impressive for freshmen taking their first university course in art and archaeology. They are both to be congratulated for their excellent work!”

In a separate competition, Saleeby also won the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Freshman Seminar Essay Award for her paper in which she explored the interplay between the physical appearance of family shrines with the rituals performed at these domestic worship spaces. “The paper analyzes the artistic qualities of several different types of lararia and analyzes how religious rites would have been performed by members of the entire familia in a way that strengthened interpersonal bonds,” said Saleeby. “The ceremonies affected the art and vice versa.”

Held each year in late March, the Undergraduate Writing Symposium showcases exemplary writing by Vanderbilt’s undergraduates while honoring their achievements as writers and scholars.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 5, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, Student/Alumni, VRC

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John Janusek to Present “Skywatchers of the Ancient Americas” at the Wond’ry on Wednesday, April 5

Learn about the “Skywatchers of the Ancient Americas” with John Janusek, associate professor of anthropology, on Wednesday, April 5, at 3 pm in room 202 of the Wond’ry. In anticipation of the August 2017 solar eclipse, various ongoing activities and date-specific events related to the solar eclipse will be held across Vanderbilt’s campus.

Janusek’s presentation will compare the science of astronomy and skywatching in several civilizations across the Precolumbian Americas. He will compare cultures in the South American Andes with Middle American Maya and North American Mississippian cultures, examining how these cultures developed highly precise techniques for tracking the recurring movement of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, and the periodic occurrence of solar eclipses. Janusek will further demonstrate how such celestial movements and occurrences were central to the political and ritual power of these civilizations.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 4, 2017 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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