The College Art Association has opened its portal to paper proposals for open-call sessions at next year’s conference in Chicago, Illinois, February 12-15, 2020.
Proposals, due via email to the session chairs no later than July 23, 2019, must include CAA’s proposal form (which asks for a brief statement and a 250-word abstract) and a short-form CV. For the proposal form and complete submission instructions, see here.
Below are abstracts for three sessions related to HNA membership and fields of study.
LANDSCAPE THROUGH A SOCIOPOLITICAL LENS: REPRESENTING THE ENVIRONMENT IN NORTHERN EUROPE, CA. 1430-1795
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Netherlandish Art
Scarcely a news cycle passes without discussion of national borders, climate change, natural disasters, and globalization. This discourse has prompted new questions about the visual representation of the physical environment, making this an apt moment to reassess the extraordinary production and consumption of painted, drawn, and printed landscapes in Northern Europe in the early modern period. This session seeks to complicate existing understandings of this material by focusing on its intrinsic but diverse sociopolitical content. How, for example, did pictorial tactics and conventions function as inscriptions of power, control, identity, and otherness? What was the role of these images in shaping contemporary conversations about social ecologies, about land ownership and labor? How has the vision of nature provided by Northern artists informed or shifted understandings of “space,” “nature,” and “environment?” Can we understand historiographical models—the advent of global art history, for example—as a product of the study of Northern landscape? How can we think of landscapes as agents that actively shaped the way in which individuals viewed and lived in the world? This session hopes to attend to the concept of “world,” integrating considerations of “the Northern landscape” with those of the landscape imagery produced by artists working in overseas territories, like the Dutch East Indies. We seek papers on all forms of landscape, including cityscapes, marine views, backgrounds of religious paintings, garden design, and city planning, produced in, or in connection with, the Northern Netherlands, Southern Netherlands, or Germany between the 15th and 18th centuries.
Field of Study:
Europe
Northern Europe
Sixteenth Century
Seventeenth Century
Fifteenth Century
Chairs: Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Harvard Art Museums – joanna@seidenstein.com and Sarah Walsh Mallory, Harvard University – sarahmallory@g.harvard.edu
RE-ASSESSING THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN MALE NUDE
Long understudied in early modern Northern art and visual culture, the male nude is attracting new kinds of scholarly attention. Theories of embodiment and performance, and the rise of masculinity studies, have all contributed to broadening the previous focus on issues particular to female nude in Northern art. Recent scholarship has focused on how the Northern male nude constructs notions of virtue, classical stability, pastoral beauty, and pathos across a range of media and functions including prints and drawings, drawing books, portraiture, history painting, and the emerging genre of male bathers.Such new inquiry demonstrates a diversity of animating questions and interpretive methods for considering how the male nude produced significance for various audiences in the Netherlands. This panel aims to reassess the male nude in relation to artistic production and reception; early modern humanist, natural, and material knowledge; and classed systems of status and power, fashion and body ideals.
Papers can address issues including but not limited to: representing the body in studio pedagogy and practices; the represented male body as a medium of scientific knowledge; dress and contemporary practices of personal grooming; early modern debates about nudity and morality in art; the collecting and display of male nude figures in aspirational portraiture and classical allegories; the male nude as the site of identification and/or disavowal for the male artist; the social, political and religious semiotics of the male nude male reassessed by gender and sexuality studies; the male nude shaped by the cross-cultural dynamics of the global Netherlands.
Field of Study:
Northern Europe
Western and Central Europe
Early Modern (1450-1800)
Seventeenth Century
Sixteenth Century
Chairs: Martha Hollander, Hofstra University – martha.hollander@hofstra.edu and Lisa Rosenthal, Univ. Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – lrosenth@illinois.edu
REGISTERING THE MATRIX: PRINTING MATRICES AS SITES OF ARTISTIC MEDIATION
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Print Scholars
Printing matrices often have storied pasts. Rembrandt’s plates were reprinted, reworked, otherwise altered, and sent under the roller until little of the artist’s hand remained. One eighteenth-century printer etched over a Rembrandt plate in the name of restoration before cutting it down into smaller plates; another printed Rembrandt’s plates with masks, plate tone, and in combination with other plates in order to create new compositions; and Rembrandt himself repurposed a plate by Hercules Segers. Beyond Rembrandt, Gauguin’s woodblocks were printed in editions by himself, by printer Louis Roy, and posthumously by Pola Gauguin. The resulting editions vary widely in inking, coloring, and support. Contemporary artists’ prints produced by publishers like Gemini G.E.L or Crown Point Press are often as much a product of collaboration with the printers as of the artist’s singular hand. While the Blocks, Plates, and Stones conference held at the Courtauld in 2017 did much to shed light on the matrix itself, examining the contributions of printers and publishers adds complexity to notions of authorship and illuminates processes particular to the medium; and looking at the afterlife and reuse of matrices provides evidence of artistic encounters, exchanges, and processes.