Gwen Bennett had a very busy and exciting last several months. She recently traveled to Britain for three weeks to see how archaeology was conducted on architectural remains at several Roman sites. In addition to the classes Professor Bennett is teaching fall semester on the archaeology of ancient China and on the production of art in East Asia, she was a recipient of a Korea Society Fellowship this fall which consisted of a 12-day study trip to Korea to learn more about current and past Korean culture, history, art history, architecture, and archaeology. The Korea society’s intention in funding this trip for ten U.S. scholars is to bring knowledge of Korea to more Americans. The information gathered from this trip will be put directly to use in the course she is teaching spring semester 2004 on the art and archaeology of early Korea and Japan. Professor Bennett will also be traveling to China this fall to participate in an October conference on the rise of civilization in the eastern coastal “Haidai” region of Shangdong, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Henan. This is an important conference for her as she did her dissertation research on this area, and this is a chance to share her own research, learn about that of other scholars of this region, and to see many of her Chinese colleagues again.

Professor Elizabeth Childs' book Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign appeared in the series The Hermeneutics of Art with Peter Lang Press (New York and Bern) in 2004. Several publications on aspects of Gauguin studies, visual culture in fin-de-siècle Tahiti, and exoticism and modernism are currently in press. Her recent lectures and conference papers include: "Inventing paradise: Gauguin and Oceanic cultures” (French Historical Studies Conference, Paris), “The invention of culture, or the ethnographic vacation? Paul Gauguin and Henry Adams in Tahiti, 1891-1893,” (College Art Association, Atlanta), “Gauguin’s Dialects,” in A Fine Regard: A symposium in honor of Kirk Varnedoe (The Institute for Fine Arts, New York University) and “Inventing Culture: Nature, Culture, and the Fading Paradise in Gauguin’s Art,” Keynote speech and the Robert Humber Lecture, Graduate Symposium on Art and Nature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. In winter 2005-2006, she will speak on Rousseau's Urban Exoticism in the symposium on "The Exotic and The Modern" at the Tate London and the Courtauld Institute in London, and on "Crossing borders: Gauguin as sculptor" at a symposium at Duke Unviersity's new Nasher Museum. In spring 2006, she will lead an alumni tour to Provence in celebration of the centennary of Cézanne. She is enjoying serving as Acting Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology in fall 2005, and in spring 2006, she will take a term as Chair of the Faculty Council in Arts & Sciences. She is currently (and joyfully) on a part-time family leave, following the adoption of Ana Elizabeth Childs-Klein. In fall 2006, she looks forward to co-teaching a joint studio and history course on "The Print as Social Agent" with artist Lisa Bulawsky, Associate Professor, College of Art, in the new Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.

Paul Crenshaw was on sabbatical in the spring of 2004, continuing his work on several projects related to Rembrandt and his contemporaries. His next major study will be a new interpretation of a group of paintings that Rembrandt made for the Sicilian patron Antonio Ruffo between 1653 and 1644. The research was fostered in the summer of 2003 by a Washington University Arts and Sciences Faculty Research Grant. Professor Crenshaw will have a book published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press entitled Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art World in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. The study examines the causes, circumstances, and effects of the 1656 declaration of insolvency by the great Dutch master. This book pulls together material from all aspects of the artist’s career that shed light on its nadir, his bankruptcy. As part of Washington University’s Sesquicentennial Celebration in September 2003, Professor Crenshaw presented four of the Gallery of Art’s prized etchings by Rembrandt: The Death of the Virgin, St. Jerome under a Pollard Tree, Christ Preaching, and the stunning impression of the Three Crosses. These and several other Dutch paintings and prints were then incorporated in an exhibition in the Teaching Gallery.

Rebecca DeRoo recently completed her book, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2006. It examines how the protests and social movements of 1968 France triggered a reevaluation of museums and artistic practice. In fall of 2004, Rebecca DeRoo’s article “Christian Boltanski’s Memory Images: Remaking French Museums in the Aftermath of ’68” appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. At the 2005 College Art Association Annual Conference, she participated in the “Conceptual Portraiture” panel. Her paper was titled “Christian Boltanski’s Self-Portraits: The Death of the Artist?” She also presented a paper on the Pompidou Center at the “Spaces and Places” conference of the Society for the Study of French History. This year, she has developed two series of workshops for students writing M.A. theses and B.A. honors theses in the field of contemporary art. These workshops have created a forum for sharing work in progress; they also provide practical information on methods for research and writing. Professor DeRoo also continues to offer classes (cross-listed with the Women and Gender Studies Program) that emphasize feminist art history and gender theory, including “Reframing Feminist Art of the 1970s” and “Gender in Contemporary Art.”

John Klein joined the faculty this fall as Visiting Associate Professor of Modern Art. He has taught for more than ten years at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and has also been on the faculty at Columbia University and St. Lawrence University. In Fall 2005 he offered a seminar entitled "Rethinking Matisse" and a course in Modern Sculpture; in conjunction with this class he started an internship program at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, in which selected students receive docent training and give tours of the exhibition "Minimalism and Beyond." In Spring 2006 he will teach Introduction to Modern Art and will offer a seminar on the changing concept of decoration within modernism. He gave two papers in France, in June and October, on aspects of Fauve portraiture in international Symposia connected to the exhibition Matisse-Detrain: Collioure 1905, un été fauve (held at the Musée d' Art Moderna, Céret, and the Musée Matisse, Le Cateau), for which he was also an advisory curator and a catalogue essay author. In November 2005 he is giving a lecture at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen on Matisse's decorative projects in mural painting, stained glass, tapestry, printed fabrics, and ceramic tile, and is participating in a colloquium on Matisse and modernism. In a conference entitled "Place/Displacement: Sculpture and Social Space," at the Nasher Museum at Duke University in February 2006, he will deliver a paper on Matisse's sculpture in light of the classic paragone debate. In addition to his recent essay, "Paradoxe du portrait fauve," for the exhibition mentioned above, two book chapters are recently published for forthcoming: "Degree Zero of self-Portraiture: Matisse's Self-Portrait in a Striped Jersey, 1906," in Matisse 1905-1918, ed. Kasper Monrad, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 2005; and "Inventing Mediterranean Harmony in Matisse's Paper Cut-Outs," in Visualizing the Modern Mediterranean, ed. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Angela Miller, currently Director of Graduate Studies, lectured on a range of topics in 2004-05. She continues to speak on subjects relating to 19th century American landscape art, with lectures at the National Gallery of Art in September 2004, for a symposium on Sanford Gifford; at the Milwaukee Museum Art Museum on American Landscape and National Identity (December 2004), and at the University of Texas, Austin on panoramas for a conference which brought together an international group of scholars for a comparative look at landscape and nation-building in April of 2005. This December she will talk at the Whitney Museum on Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha, whose Course of Empire series represented the United States at last summer’s Venice Biennale. She had the pleasure of attending the Biennale with Sabine Eckmann, Director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art. She talked on western genre painting at Pennsylvania State University in November of 2004, and at Harvard, she was one of ten senior scholars invited to speak on new research in American art. Her paper examined parallel currents of homelessness, cosmopolitanism, and the search for place in the art of the 1920s. She also presented at several conferences: in August 2004, she spoke on 16th century engravings of the European encounter with the New World, at the International Conference on the History of Art in Montreal; and in April 2005, she spoke on the State of the Field of Visual Culture Sudies at the American History Association meeting in San Jose, CA. Miller has also presented on the survey text American Encounters, which she and a team of five other authors are currently editing for publication in 2006/07 (Prentice-Hall). She was one of four invited speakers for a symposium at the University of Iowa on “The Arts in American Studies Scholarship.” A version of her paper “Writing Across Borders: American Arts after Multiculturalism,” was also presented at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island in December 2004. Miller has three articles forthcoming: “Death and Resurrection in an Artist’s Studio,” for American Art; “’With Eyes Wide Open’: The Americanization of Surrealism,” for Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s, edited by Lutz Koepnick and Sabine Eckmann (Palgrave, 2006); and “The Image of Nature in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation’ and the Art of Landscape,” for a cross-disciplinary anthology of essays on the changing concept of wilderness, written from the perspective of environmental history, to be published in 2007 by Oxford University Press.

Susan Rotroff has most recently been working on Hellenistic pottery on the island of Samothrace, bronze and ivory artifacts from a Hellenistic well in Athens, and on an underwater survey off the southern coast of Turkey.


Susan Rotroff in the Museum on Samothrace in Greece, summer 2005

William E. Wallace has published short notes on Titian, Caravaggio, and Orazio Gentileschi as well as two book review and three articles on various aspects of Michelangelo (two more still in press). He organized a session on recent Michelangelo scholarship for the annual meeting of the College Art Association (Seattle, 2004), and delivered papers at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting (New York, 2004). He lectured at Vanderbilt University and the St. Louis Art Museum and served as a participant and historical consultant on a two-part BBC film documentary and drama, “The Divine Michelangelo” to air in 2004.