John Gage read History at Oxford where as an undergraduate he came to the notice of the great political philosopher, Isiaah Berlin who invited him to coffee. Not much impressed with this encounter, or indeed with art history at Oxford, John Gage moved on to the Courtauld Institute in London. He began his career, however, teaching English in Italy and Germany. It was there that he acquired the language skills that he would make use of in his wide-ranging research in primary sources on the history of colour from antiquity to the present day. He became a Lecturer at the University of East Anglia before being appointed, in 1979, by the University of Cambridge where he also became a Fellow of Wolfson College. In 1992 he became Head of Department and, in 1998, Reader in the History of Western Art. He retired in 1996 and moved to Italy and Australia, continuing his vigorous and innovative research, turning his attention to such subjects as light and shadow in holography and Aboriginal approaches to colour.

With his boundless curiosity and great love of art John Gage was a truly inspiring teacher as well as a brilliant researcher. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to art history he received many prizes, among them the prestigious Mitchell Prize for Art History in 1994. A year later he was also elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Yet he believed in the study of art history for its own sake and held considerations of career, status and professional advancement in deepest contempt. His dry sense of humour and subtle irony would bring this home to those who worked with him, while his kindness, generosity, and good nature encouraged students to follow in whatever direction their curiosity would lead them. He was one of the freest and most independent minds that Art History has seen in recent decades and he will be sorely and bitterly missed.

Charlotte Klonk Institute of Art and Visual History Humboldt-University of Berlin

It is with great sadness that the Courtauld Institute of Art announces the sudden death on Tuesday 7 February of John House, Emeritus Professor of the Courtauld Institute of Art, at the age of 66.

One of the pre-eminent scholars of nineteenth-century French art of his generation, John served The Courtauld with great distinction from his appointment in 1980 up until his retirement as the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in 2010; we cannot think of anyone with a deeper attachment to all aspects of our community, with which his close and richly productive involvement has now been cruelly cut short.

John was a much loved and greatly respected teacher and colleague. His scholarship reached well beyond the world of academe through the many wonderful exhibitions he curated both here at The Courtauld, at the Royal Academy and throughout the world. It is almost impossible to imagine The Courtauld without his strong yet benign presence near at hand.

We shall be making arrangements for a formal tribute to be paid at a later date.  In the meantime we offer our profound condolences to John’s family and friends.

Deborah Swallow, The Director of the Courtauld

The Guardian obituary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/feb/14/john-house-obituary

Website: www.ktpress.co.uk

n.paradoxa publishes the work of women authors, scholars and artists working anywhere in the world. The journal is published in print and electronic format and has now reached its 15th year of publication. The focus of n.paradoxa is articles on contemporary women’s art practices (visual arts only, women artists working post-1970) or an aspect of feminist art theory which relates to their practices; as well as interviews with woman artists. Each volume is thematic.

Do not send finished articles. Articles are commissioned through negotiation with the editor: Katy Deepwell. email: katy@ktpress.co.uk Please send, well in advance of the copy deadline, an outline (1-2 paragraphs) and a short resume (1 page only). Please also outline the relation of your proposal to the theme of a particular volume.

Volume 30: Feminist Aesthetics (July 2012) (Copy deadline: 1 May 2012, to be published July 2012) After forty years of feminist art practices around the world which are neither media-specific nor have a single aesthetic (in the limited modernist sense of an identifiable “style”), how can we redefine feminist aesthetics in its relation to feminist politics today? This volume will explore questions about feminist aesthetics, art and politics and welcomes contributions which look at new and progressive lines of enquiry in these longstanding debates (even when revisiting previous formulations or arguments since the 1970s). These may touch on ‘aesthetics in the feminine’ and ‘feminist philosophical critiques of aesthetic theory’ (but the latter will only be accepted, where the primary examples used in discussion are feminist artworks (visual arts only)). Feminist critiques of aesthetic theory have drawn on and developed in relationship to post-structuralist and post-colonialist theories and contributions bringing together discussions of race, class, sexualities and ethnicities or nationalisms will also be welcomed, alongside critiques of neoliberalism.

For more information, please see: http://www.ciha2012.de/programm/postgraduierten-programm.html.

Sincerely

The CIHA2012 Congress Bureau
(Petra Krutisch, Almuth Klein, Anna Pawlik, Marian Wild)

Victoria

Tasmania

South Australia

Queensland

Dunedin

Christchurch

Wellington

Auckland

New South Wales

Australian Capital Territory

After the successful exhibition ‘Great Collections of the World – Peggy Guggenheim: A Collection in Venice’ in October 2010 to January 2011, the Art Gallery of Western Australia is currently mounting ‘REMIX’, an exhibition that showcases the creativity of twenty contemporary Western Australian artists working in a broad mix of media. The celebrated Indigenous Art Awards will take place again from August to December and the exhibition ‘Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces 1600-1800 from the Victoria and Albert Museum’ will open in September with a lecture programme. Three out of four chronological displays from the State Art Collection entitled ‘Your Collection 1800 – today’ featuring the years 1800-1920, 1920-1960 and 1960-1980 are now open at AGWA, while the fourth covering 1980 – today will open in October.

Dr Christopher Crouch, School of Communication and Arts, Edith Cowan University, and Professor of Visual Arts, Southwest University, Chongging, PRC, has edited a collection of essay on Contemporary Chinese Visual Cultural Tradition, Modernity and Globalisation (Cambria: New York, 2011) and published ‘Architecture, Design and Modern Living’ in Brooker, P., Gasiorek, Longworth, D., and Thicker, A. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

We bid fairwell to Associate Professor Donal Fitzpatrick who, after serving as Head of Curtin Art School, Curtin University, is leaving to take up a position at Griffith University, Brisbane.

Richard Read

A star feature of the NGV’s 150th anniversary year is the exhibition, ‘Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed’, guest curated by Dr Ruth Pullin. Current Director, Dr Gerard Vaughan, said: “This fascinating exhibition takes a fresh look at the remarkable contribution Australia’s most distinguished landscape artist made to Melbourne’s developing arts culture in his role as the inaugural Curator and Master of the School of Painting at the NGV. In 2011 we also celebrate the anniversary of 200 years of von Guérard’s birth date”. In honour of this anniversary, the Victorian College of Arts hosted a symposium about the history of the Gallery School, which started in 1867 under von Guérard’s leadership. As we know, the Gallery School is the founding institution of the VCA, which formed in 1972 under Lenton Parr.

Another important birthday is being celebrated across town. For 25 years Centre for Contemporary Photography has been Melbourne’s premier venue for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based art, providing a platform for emerging and established artists. The have consistently presented high quality exhibitions, publications, professional workshops and an annual series of free public lectures. This year their line up has included Dr Alison Nordström, who was in Australia as a guest of Bendigo Art Gallery for the exhibition ‘American Dreams: 20th Century Photography from George Eastman House’ and Victor Burgin, who was in Melbourne to participate in the ARC-funded free-entry symposium ‘Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation’ at the University of Melbourne on 18–19 March 2011.

News from Monash

The Faculty of Art & Design has a new Dean – Professor Shane Murray – who was the Foundation Professor of Architecture at Monash before taking up this position. One of the first things the new Dean did was to streamline the Faculty into three departments. This means that theory and history are now embedded in the studio disciplines with the art historians/theorists in the Department of Fine Arts. From there we run a Theory Program for both the Faculty of Art & Design and the Faculty of Arts, continuing the major in Visual Culture.

Publications, events and grants at Monash:

Melissa Miles won a large ARC Discovery in 2010 focused on the History of Australian Photography; Anne Marsh’s book Look: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980 was launched in December 2010 (website to be launched in August 2011).

Melissa Miles, Daniel Palmer, Anne Marsh, Mark Davison and the Centre for Contemporary Photography are running a public seminar at the CCP on October 1st this year as part of the ARC Linkage project ‘Photography as a Crime’. The CCP will be curating an exhibition around this theme at the same time. An anthology is forthcoming. Melissa Miles and Daniel Palmer both received awards from the DVC Research to enable their research.

Melissa Miles has organised an international photography symposium on ‘National Histories of Photography’ with Geoffrey Batchen (Victoria University, Wellington), Tanya Sheehan (Rutgers University) and Elizabeth Gertsakis, so be hosted by the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University on 4th August 2011.

Luke Morgan is editing the proceedings of IMPACT7: Intersections and Counterpoints, an international, multi-disciplinary printmaking conference to be hosted by the Faculty of Art & Design in September of this year. Luke also has two chapters on the design and meaning of early modern landscape in the important new six volume work edited by John Dixon Hunt and Michael Leslie, A Cultural History of Gardens being published by Berg in September this year. (Thank you, Anne Marsh, for supplying the news from Monash).

News from La Trobe

After the shock demise of the original Art History Department at La Trobe, Art History was relocated as a Program with the History Department. In a vote of confidence for the future of Art History at La Trobe, Art History has recently been reinstated as a major, actively supported by La Trobe University Museum of Art and the Art History Alumni. Dr Adrian Jones OAM and Dr Lisa Beaven from the La Trobe University School of Historical and European Studies History/Art History Program have convened a conference, ‘The 14th Australasian David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, to be held at the State Library of Victoria and National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Monday 4th – Thursday 7th July 2011. ‘The David Nichol Smith seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies’ is a long-running quadrennial conference that has spawned many influential publications. Inaugurated and supported by the National Library of Australia, the Nichol Smith is the major Australasian showcase for inter-disciplinary professional and academic discussion on eighteenth-century studies, in history, literature, art history, and musicology, studies of material culture and anthropology and archaeology. The conference embraces every aspect of life, politics and culture during the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, circa 1688 to 1815. International and national art history speakers include Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia), Chloe Chard (London), Gerard Vaughan (Director, NGV), Mark Ledbury (incoming Power Professor, University of Sydney) and Karin Wolfe (British School at Rome). For the full program see here.

Lisa Beaven of the Art History Program, La Trobe University, has published An Ardent Patron: Cardinal Camillo Massimo and his Antiquarian and Artistic Circle (London: Paul Holberton, 2011). The book is glowingly reviewed by Xavier Salomon, Curator of Italian Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the latest issue of Storia dell’Arte (in Italian!).

Adelina Modesti, ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Art History Program at La Trobe, has the English translation of her 2004 book in Italian on Elisabetta Sirani, a 17th century painter who established Europe’s first design academy specifically for women, forthcoming with Brepols. Richard Haese, who remains actively involved in the Art History Program at La Trobe, is publishing his long-awaited monograph on sixties radical artist Mike Brown with Miegunyah Press later this year.

Caroline Jordan has received a United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney grant to travel to the University of Austin, Texas and Columbia University, New York, to further her research on the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s program of modernising and internationalising the visual arts sector in Australia in the mid twentieth century. (Thank you, Caroline Jordan, for supplying the news from La Trobe).

News from the University of Melbourne

The Art History Program at the University of Melbourne has recently relocated from the Elisabeth Murdoch Building to the 3rd floor of the John Medley, along with Australian Indigenous Studies, Screen Studies and Arts and Cultural Management. The move took place in the middle of semester and was expertly handed by the current Head of Program, Dr Christopher Marshall. Professor Jaynie Anderson, Herald Chair of Fine Arts and President of the International Committee for the History of Art from 2008 to 2012, is in the corner office once inhabited by Professor Joseph Burke. She is celebrating the recent successful launch of a special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography dedicated to Australian Art Historiography that she guest edited. Available online. We are also looking forward to the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, also edited by Jaynie Anderson, due out later this year. Here. In December 2010, Dr Felicity Harley-McGowan was appointed as the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the University of Melbourne. She is also a Research Fellow in the Trinity College Theological School, University of Melbourne. On completing her PhD in the department of Classics at the University of Adelaide (Australia), Felicity was awarded post-doctoral fellowships at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and subsequently The British School at Rome. She is a welcome addition to the Art History Program. A new monograph by Dr Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch is forthcoming from MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Associate Professor and Reader in Contemporary International and Australian Art, Charles Green, is working on several projects resulting from his recent ARC successes.

Art History’s postgraduate community at the University of Melbourne has been particularly active in establishing and maintaining several reading groups, including Modern and Contemporary Art and Australian Aboriginal Art. Fellow of the Art History Department, Dr Helen McDonald, has won a fellowship to the ANU to work on art and climate change. Congratulations Helen.

Around Town

MELBOURNE ART NETWORK

With Katrina Grant at the helm, the Melbourne Art Network (MAN) has quickly established itself as an invaluable art history newsletter offering email, Facebook and Twitter updates on scholarly art happenings in Melbourne: lectures, conferences, exhibitions, jobs etc. It is also a lively forum for critical commentary and reviews from wherever our contributors may be around the world. New members and contributors are always welcome. Best of all, it is free to subscribe. A wonderful source of news and information for everything art historical!

Susan Lowish

The other main arts event was Ten Days on the Island in late March/early April which featured art exhibitions including Reconstructing the Animal curated by Dr Yvette Watt

(Associate lecturer in Fine Art at the Tasmanian School of Art); Volcano Lover by Lucy Bleach (Associate lecturer in Fine Art, Tasmanian School of Art) and River Effects: the Waterways of Tasmania curated by Malcolm Bywaters (School of Visual and Performing Arts, Launceston) and Professor Noel Frankham (Head of the Tasmanian School of Art) . Associate Professor David Stephenson (Tasmanian School of Art) had a major exhibition in the Julie Saul Gallery, New York Light Cities: Tokyo, Melbourne, San Francisco, Las Vegas while Milan Milojevic (Head of Printmaking, Tasmanian School of Art) had work selected for the exhibition Personal Space: Contemporary Chinese and Australian Prints exhibited in Sydney then touring China. Dr. Llewellyn Negrin (Head of Art and Design Theory, Tasmanian School of Art) had an article ‘The Self as image: a critical appraisal of postmodern theories of fashion’ re-published in The Fashion History Reader ed. by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (New York & London: Routledge). This article has also been translated into Chinese and is to be published in the journal Art and Design Research.

Llewellyn Negrin

The postgraduate program in Art History at the University of Adelaide and the Art Gallery of South Australia are now teaching interactive courses online including virtual classes in the Art Gallery. The four online courses taught around the Art Gallery’s collection are Japanese Art, Australian Art, European Art since the Renaissance and Australian Indigenous Art. For more details visit www.arthistory.adelaide.edu.au

Catherine Speck

A new research grouping, Urban Modernities, has commenced at QUT combining design, social theory and arts research. A former version of this research group will soon publish its first research project, “Sweat: The Subtropical Imaginary.”

At the University of Queensland Professor Anne Marsh, Director, Art Theory Program and Associate Dean Research, Monash University, will deliver the 2011 Daphne Mayo Lecture on Wednesday 24 August.

A number of new appointments have been made at Queensland College of Art Griffith University. Dr Maura Reilly has been appointed as the first Professor of Art Theory. Maura has held senior administrative museum positions in New York City, and from 2003 to 2008, as founding curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she co- curated (with Linda Nochlin) the critically acclaimed ‘Global Feminisms’. Dr Anne Kirker has been appointed Adjunct Associate Professor at QCA. Anne has worked in leading public art galleries in New Zealand and Australia. She is a writer and exhibition curator and an expert on Australian and International prints, drawings and photographs. Professor Tony Fry has also been appointed to head QCA’s Master of Design Futures. Tony’s long-term engagement in Design history and theory is well known to the academic community. He is currently also engaged in international projects with communities in East Timor.

The QCA has opened a Postgraduate Gallery in the central suburb of Wooloongabba. The POP gallery is designed for exhibiting and examining Postgraduate students from QCA and also provides a space for collaborations between students and other artists associated with QCA.The IMA in association with QCA Gold Coast is alsoopening a Pop-Up Space at Circle on Cavill, Surfers Paradise. IMA Surfers will present four shows over four months, starting with Damiano Bertoli’s Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa.

Rosemary Hawker