Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Betsey Robinson Receives Chancellor’s Award For Research

Betsey Robinson, associate professor in the departments of history of art and classical studies, received the Chancellor’s Award for Research at the Vanderbilt Fall Faculty Assembly on August 22. Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos recognized Robinson for her groundbreaking research in classical archaeology and art history, citing her monograph, Histories of Peirene: A Corinthian Fountain in Three Millennia (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011), which won the prestigious PROSE Award for Archaeology and Anthropology by the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers.

“Praised as a singular achievement of cross-disciplinary research, Histories of Peirene represents a remarkable study of a historic site known in Greek mythology as the place where Bellerophon tamed the winged horse Pegasus,” said Zeppos. “Betsey Robinson combined precise archaeological and archival research, and drawings that illustrate the development of the site, with a beautiful narrative to illuminate the story with a sense of human interaction with the fountain.”

Robinson was one of five faculty members to be recognized for excellence in research, scholarship, or creative expression. Each winner received $1,000 and an engraved pewter julep cup. “This award is fitting recognition of Betsey Robinson’s important contribution to the field of art history as well as to the humanities more broadly,” said Kevin Murphy, Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and chair of the history of art department.

Captivated by Peirene during her first visit to Corinth in 1996, Robinson has conducted research at the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies since 1997, focusing on water supply, architecture, and works of art in context. “Peirene struck me at once as a unique monument,” said Robinson during an interview with ASCSA publisher Andrew Reinhard. “I’d imagined it to be a great fountain on the forum like so many others, and was surprised to find its façade well below the forum and facing away from it, tucked into the landscape instead of towering over it. As I worked on Corinthian fountains and the ‘culture of water,’ Peirene’s longer history caught my attention.”

Her interdisciplinary approach to Peirene merges archaeology, art history, architecture, mythology, historiography, hydrology, chemistry and microbiology. Reflecting her major interest in visual and contextual analysis, the volume tells the story of the celebrated Peirene fountain, the evolution of the site of Corinth around it, and the history of excavation from 1898 to the present.

Her current project, Divine Prospects: Mounts Helicon and Parnassus in Ancient Experience and Imagination, is a book-length manuscript on Hellenistic and Roman perceptions of, and engagement within, Greek landscapes and sanctuaries. Ongoing research considers Roman-era mosaics in Corinth, and the history of archaeological excavation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Robinson (Harvard University, A.B., A.L.M.; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.) teaches courses in the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world. Her primary interests include Greek and Roman architecture and art, ancient cities and sanctuaries, and landscapes—actual, imagined, and as represented in ancient art and literature.

The Jacque Voegeli Fellow and co-director of the 2011/2012 Warren Center Fellows Program, “Sacred Ecology: Landscape Transformations for Ritual Practice,” Robinson is the co-organizer of a one-day symposium to be hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on August 30, 2013.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 23, 2013 in HART, VRC

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HART Department Welcomes New Faculty This Fall

The fall semester always brings new faces and new courses into our midst, among them, two faculty members who recently joined Vanderbilt’s History of Art Department: Halle O’Neal, Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian Art, and Rebecca VanDiver, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History.

O’Neal (University of Georgia, B.A.; University of Kansas, M.A., Ph.D.) specializes in premodern Japanese Buddhist art, in particular the intersections of body, relics, and text in visual culture. She teaches classes on Japanese painting and sculpture, East Asian art and architecture, and Buddhist relics and reliquaries. This semester O’Neal will teach two courses: Arts of East Asia and The Arts of Japan.

Prior to arriving at Vanderbilt, O’Neal was a Reischauer Institute Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. She is currently working on a book manuscript, A Puzzle of Word and Picture: Locating Meaning in the Japanese Jeweled Stūpa Mandalas. This project focuses on the connections between the manipulation and enshrinement of relics and the roles played by word and picture in the expression of meaning. The mandalas, whose central reliquary is constructed not from conventional line work but from the sacred characters of Buddhist scriptures, offer an intriguing vantage on Buddhist notions of body and relic as conveyed through complex negotiations of text and image.

VanDiver (Harvard College, A.B.; Duke University, M.A., Ph.D) teaches courses on modern/contemporary African American and African art and visual culture. Her research centers on articulations of blackness in twentieth century African American art, African American artistic engagements with Africa, and the history of display and collection of African culture in the West. This semester VanDiver will teach several sections of the History of Western Art II, Renaissance to Modern Art.

VanDiver had a pre-doctoral fellowship (2011-2013) at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, the University of Virginia, where she taught a course entitled Watching Blackness: the African American Image in 20th Century Film. She specialized in African American Art and the Art of the African Diaspora, and her dissertation was entitled “Loïs Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice and Africa in the 20th Century.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 21, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Swiss Abstractionist Hans Hinterreiter on View in Fine Arts Gallery

Swiss Abstractionist Hans Hinterreiter is the focus of the latest Fine Arts Gallery exhibition, which opens on Tuesday, July 9, in Cohen Memorial Hall. Hans Hinterreiter: A Theory of Form and Color will be on view through September 12. Free and open to the public, the gallery currently observes summer viewing hours: Tuesday through Friday, 12-4 pm; Saturday, 1-5 pm; and closed on Sunday and Monday.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 8, 2013 in VRC

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Vivien Fryd to Present Talk to Berlin Historical Association

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, will give a talk in Berlin entitled A Non-Fictional Thriller: Henry Ries, the Quakers, the State Department and My Mother’s Dramatic Rescue from Nazi Germany. Fryd, niece of the New York Times photographer Henry Ries (1917-2004), will address the Berlin Historical Association on June 25 at the Allied Museum.

Ries, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Hitler with his sister (Fryd’s mother) in 1938, returned to Germany after the war and often used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath. Among his most evocative pictures of postwar Germany are his images of the Berlin airlift in 1948 and 1949.

The Berlin Historical Association has also invited Fryd to lead a tour of the exhibition in the Berlinische Galerie entitled Art in Berlin, 1880-1890, which includes seven of her uncle’s photographs. The gallery tour will be held on July 14.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 25, 2013 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Christopher Johns to Lecture in Rome at International Conference

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will present a research paper on chinoiserie at the international conference “Torino Britannica,” held June 19-22 at the British School in Rome and the Centro di Studi di Venaria Reale in Turin. This interdisciplinary conference will examine a neglected aspect of eighteenth-century Grand Tour culture; namely, the role of Turin, capital city of the Piedmont-Savoy polity, in cultural and intellectual exchanges between the British Isles and Italy in the Age of Enlightenment. One of the sponsors of the conference is the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London.

In his paper, “Chinoiserie in Piedmont: An International Language of Diplomacy and Modernity,” Johns attempts to situate the widespread deployment of chinoiserie art and decoration in several Savoyard royal residences as not only a sign of exoticist fantasy and Rococo caprice but, much more importantly, as a signifier of the new dynasty’s aspirations to ally itself visually with other leading western European royal houses that frequently turned to chinoiserie as a fashionable mode redolent of colonial ambitions, global trade networks, and engagement with non-western cultures.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 21, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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HART Professors to Lecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing

Betsey Robinson, associate professor of the history of art, and Tracy Miller, acting chair of the history of art department, will deliver comparative lectures on Thursday, May 23, in the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Their overarching topic is Sacred Landscapes Real and Imagined: Role Reversals in the Study of Pre-modern Greek and Chinese Ritual Space.

Greece and China are the sources of two of the most idiosyncratic, recognizable, and influential architectures of the world. Yet, when taught in survey courses, they are usually characterized in very different terms. Discussions of the Greek temple often emphasize geometry present in stone remains: the beauty of a marble temple derives from monumental materials, harmonic proportions, and carefully calculated optical illusion. By contrast, the unique qualities of Chinese architecture have often been represented in their relationship to nature and ephemeral materials: monumental palaces of the distant past are lost because they were built of timber; the literati garden denies geometry in its efforts to accurately represent landscape.

Robinson’s lecture is entitled Sacred Mountains of Ancient Greece: Monuments, Landscape, and Imagination. Miller will address Naturalizing Buddhist Cosmology in the Temple Architecture of China. These two lectures will illustrate how the architectural traditions of Greece and China can be read in terms usually used to characterize the other. Through a discussion of the importance of natural landscapes in Greek religious practice, and the use of geometry in the creation of sacred stone monuments in China, Robinson and Miller provide a forum to discuss the way in which sacred space was discovered and defined in the early centuries of the Common Era across Eurasia.

Robinson will discuss architecture and landscape at two central Greek sanctuaries from the second century BCE into the first century CE. The Mouseion on Mount Helikon marked the place where the Muses (goddesses of inspiration) were said to have appeared to the poet Hesiod, but its development came centuries afterwards, supported by eastern Mediterranean dynasts and later, elite Romans. Despite broad interest, the sanctuary never grew beyond a small cluster of buildings overshadowed by their mountainous surroundings.

The ancient oracular sanctuary at Delphi on Mount Parnassos, in contrast, was already densely developed by the period in question, leading new benefactors to make their marks with striking monuments in prominent places. “I shall compare settings, sites, and monuments, reading sacred landscapes against a backdrop of contemporary literature and art,” said Robinson. “In so doing, I hope to shed light on a crucial period, in which Mounts Helikon and Parnassos evolved into potent symbols of inspiration in Western culture.”

Miller will address the manner in which a new cosmology, that of Buddhism, was adapted to the environment of the Yellow River valley during the first centuries of the Common Era. “When Buddhism was introduced into East Asia, we see indigenous populations naturalizing the forms of ritual architecture by translating concepts of altar, palace, and temple from South Asia into the local architectural language,” said Miller.

By focusing on a single monument, the stone Yicihui Pillar (ca. 567 CE), Miller will show how the ritual diagrams associated with the vāstupurusha mandala were applied and adapted to an architecture emphasizing different geometries than those in the homeland of the Buddha. “The use of the mandala to reorganize morphemes such as the palace/temple hall allowed for the creation of a new, and symbolically potent, architecture—one that could encompass the space and time of a cultural tradition as rich as that of early medieval China.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 20, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Department to Honor HART Graduates at Reception on May 9

History of Art majors and minors and their families are invited to attend the department’s reception for our graduating seniors on Thursday, May 9, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. The event will be held in the atrium of Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus, and awards will be announced at 3:30 p.m.

Graduates and their families attending the reception are also invited to view the current exhibit in the Fine Arts Gallery near the atrium from noon to 4:00 p.m. British art from Vanderbilt University’s Fine Arts Gallery Collection is the focus of an exhibit titled Four Hundred Years of British Art. This comprehensive survey—the first of its kind in more than two decades to draw on the nearly 300 British objects held by the Gallery—is presented in honor of Robert L. Mode, associate professor of art, who is retiring after forty-six years of teaching art history at Vanderbilt. Much of his research and teaching focused on British art.

The gallery will also be open on Commencement Day (Friday, May 10) from noon to 4 p.m., and Saturday, May 11, from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 8, 2013 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Alumnus Creighton Michael Honors Professor Emeritus Milan Mihal

This summer the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery will host a special exhibition of Tapestry Suite by Creighton Michael, M.A. 1976, on view through Sunday, October 6, in the rear gallery space of Cohen Memorial Hall. Seven digital drawings, selected from Michael’s larger Tapestry series, were created by the artist in honor of Milan Mihal, professor of fine arts emeritus, and donated to the Fine Arts Gallery by the artist.

Michael expressed his gratitude to Mihal for introducing him to “the wondrous beauty and serene sensitivity of the Far East.” He also cites his experiences in Mihal’s class as an influence for much of his artistic practice over the past forty years.

Michael explained that the Tapestry series is a collection of composite drawings, layered in time and personal marking history, employing unconventional drafting tools, such as photographic negatives, video stills, sculpture, digital scans and intaglio solar plates. The artist selected the seven works featured in Tapestry Suite as a continuous narrative and a meditation on drawing. This is a common theme for Michael who, in much of his work, has expanded traditional notions of drawing by creating works of art that approach this time-honored practice in fresh, innovative ways.

Michael received his B.F.A. in painting from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1971); his M.A. in Art History from Vanderbilt University (1976); and his M.F.A. in painting and multi-media from Washington University, Saint Louis, MO (1978). His work has been featured in numerous one-person exhibitions and can be found within the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; Denver Art Museum; Hafnarborg Institute of Culture and Fine Art, Hafnarfjördur, Iceland; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Mint Museums of Art, Charlotte, NC, among others.

Michael’s drawings will take on special significance during Vanderbilt’s Homecoming/Reunion Weekend, October 4-6. Visitors should note that the Fine Arts Gallery will be closed September 13-26 for the installation of the fall exhibit that will address the theme of art and the liberal arts’ imagination.

*Creighton Michael (American, born 1949)
Tapestry 3410, 2012
Archival carbon black pigment inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Paper

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 30, 2013 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Barbara Tsakirgis Lectures on Hellenistic Houses at Morgantina

Barbara Tsakirgis, associate professor of classics and history of art, was invited to lecture on Thursday, April 4, at a conference on Hellenistic houses and their functions held at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. Tsakirgis’s paper was entitled Decor, Deposits and Descriptions: an Analysis of Space in the Hellenistic Houses at Morgantina in Their Last Century.

Tsakirgis is a classical archaeologist who specializes in the study of ancient Greek houses and households. She has been a long-time member of the excavation and research teams at the Hellenistic city of Morgantina in central Sicily and the Athenian Agora, the city center and marketplace of ancient Athens. She has published widely on the elements of Greek houses and households, including the decorated pavements at Morgantina, and is publishing the remains of the Greek and Roman houses excavated at both sites.

In 2012 Governor Bill Haslam named Tsakirgis to a five-year term on the Tennessee Archaeological Advisory Council.

*Floor mosaic from the House of the Tuscan Capitals, Room 20, Morgantina

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 16, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Essay Illuminates Intriguing Problem in 18th-Century Studies Today

An essay by Christopher Johns, entitled “Erotic Spirituality and the Catholic Revival in Napoleonic Paris: The Curious History of Antonio Canova’s Penitent Magdalen,” was recently published in the Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (volume 42), edited by Lisa Cody, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA, and published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2013. Long fascinated by the relationship between art and politics, particularly in the context of art patronage, Johns is the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of the History of Art.

The role of Catholicism arises in Johns’s examination of Antonio Canova’s immensely popular sculpture of the Penitent Magdalen (1796), which arrived in Napoleonic Paris in 1805. In the aftermath of the Revolution and successive political regimes, which had been dominated by secular, militaristic, and nationalist aesthetics, the sculpture was embraced by the public for its portrayal of intensely personal religiosity.

“Johns examines its popularity by analyzing the sculpture’s influence on French Romanticism, as well as its relationship to works by such Christian revivalists as Chateaubriand in his Atala (1801),” wrote Cody in the Editor’s Note. “By tracing the Penitent Magdalen‘s provenance, Johns also illuminates how the controversial and disdained Giovanni Battista Sommariva, an Italian count who acquired the statue by 1804, used the work as cultural capital once he moved to Paris and established himself as a tastemaker, patron, and political figure.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 16, 2013 in HART, VRC

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