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Notes from the Chair
Olga Berendsen
Faculty News
Graduate News
Alumni News

Notes from the Chair

A snapshot of the Department each year shows the ways in which the program continues older traditions and develops vital new initiatives. In some ways graduates of twenty years ago would find the offerings and the physical setting of Art History at Rutgers little changed. For example, our main lecture room is still Voorhees 104, the twin recitation rooms in the basement still serve their original function and double as the venue for an occasional lecture, the chair’s office is behind the main office, and the graduate office is at the north end of the hall upstairs. Visitors from years past will recognize that Voorhees 104 is now refurnished, painted, carpeted, and equipped with digital projection facilities. The old 2x2 dinosaur projectors that stood like canon defending the carrousels are long gone; the carrousels are encased in wood and glass; and the digital projectors hang from the ceiling. The new seats in B-15 and B-16 are no longer bolted to the floor. The offices have been repainted and carpeted too. Today’s students are also accustomed to classes in Murray 301 and in several rooms of the Zimmerli Art Museum. The basement area below the museum’s rotunda,which was once our slide room, was transformed into a graduate student lounge and new faculty offices. Our old Art Library became the new location of the Visual Resource Center (nee slide room), and the library moved into an extensive new building next door. There is a full-time “graduate” secretary now, Geralyn Colvil, but the job has evolved to handle all student records and activities for the adjoining offices of the Graduate and Undergraduate directors. Downstairs, our chief-of-staff Cathy Pizzi keeps all the books and keeps us on our schedules. With this organization, when someone calls the Department, a real human voice answers, an increasingly rare event in the era of answering services. We are still a student oriented operation.


Tracy Fitzpatrick receiving her GSNB Dissertation Teaching Award from Dean Holly Smith on May 7, 2003.

Last year this letter described classes in the Department on “The Roman Art of Death,” “Art and Commerce,” “New York/Los Angeles,” and “Theories and Practice of Historic Preservation.” The desire to give students new learning experiences through these “opportunity courses” continues. In the Spring of last year we presented classes on “ New Jersey Architecture,” “ Conservation of Building Materials and Systems,” and “Frank Lloyd Wright.” In addition, the speakers’ committee of the Graduate Student Organization has been successful in bringing a wide range of distinguished lecturers to campus, and over the course of last year we enjoyed visiting lectures by Michael Mills (Ford, Farewell, Mills, and Gatsch), Janet Foster (Columbia University), Margaret Rose Vendryes (CUNY), John Pinto (Princeton University), Roberto Contini (Gemaeldegalerie, Berlin), and Mary Garrard (American University).

In May the 2002-03 academic year was closed with our now annual graduation luncheon at the Rutgers Club. Here we celebrated the achievements, honors, and blessings bestowed on students and faculty, and we had the chance to meet some of the people who make these events possible. Dean Holly Smith attended and was happy to meet so many of our distinguished students. At that time, too, we were once again able to recognize Barbara Mitnick for her many contributions of thought, time, and funding to the Department through the Mitnick-Jacobs Fund. Greg Olsen was acknowledged for his contributions to the Sensors Lab for our graduate students. Patti Quigley and members of the Quigley family were on hand to present the Patrick J. Quigley IV Award to two deserving undergraduates, Eugene Egan and Elizabeth Royzman. A perpetual plaque honoring Elizabeth and Gene hangs in the lobby of the Department’s main office, and we will be adding the names of this year’s awardees to it in May.

Our graduate students also continue to collect accolades for their outstanding work. In Spring 2003, Tracy Fitzpatrick won the GSNB Dissertation Teaching Award, Lisa Victoria Ciresi was the recipient of the GSNB-Dean’s Research Award, and Alison Poe earned an honorable mention for the GSNBGraduate Student Teaching Award. Competition for each of these prizes among all units of the Graduate School is intense, and the fact that Art History is not only represented, but represented in abundance is testament to our standing in the University. Among the numerous conference papers our graduate students presented at professional conferences last year, we single out here Patricia Zalamea and Mary Kate O’Hare who represented the Department at, respectively, the annual Frick and Philadelphia Symposia.

Midori Yoshimoto and Sharon Matt Atkins at their collaborative exhibition “ Do-It-Yourself Fluxus” in Boston

As the new academic year opened in September 2003, we offered the usual array of classes and, in addition, a special course on “The Art and Architecture of Milan,” given by Michael Bzdak, and “Theoretical Concerns in Preservation”, given by Mark Hewitt. This Spring we have courses on the Art of the High Renaissance taught on location in New York by Inge Reist (Frick Art Reference Library), and on Renaissance domestic architecture by Tracy Ehrlich. In addition, there were many trips (as usual!) to local museums, galleries, and private collections, and we heard lectures by the artist Mary Miss (New York), and scholars Michael Leja (University of Delaware), and David Davies University College, London)

The highlight of the fall semester was the 50th Reunion of the Graduate School, for which we solicited papers and organized morning and afternoon sessions that showcased a wonderful group of alumni scholars. It is our special pleasure to thank Louise Belvedere Caldi, Dina Comisarenco,Victor Coonin, Greg Gilbert, Stephanie Leone, Gail Levin, Barbara Mitnick, Hedy de Costa Nunes, Eliot Rowlands, and Ute Tellini for their participation and presentations, as well as many, many other alumni who attended and helped us swap stories of old and catch up on recent events. After our breakfast, a morning session, lunch in New Brunswick, and an afternoon session, we still had enough group energy to be the best represented Department at the Gala Dinner Dance held at the Hyatt Hotel in the evening. It was said that Art History also dominated the dance floor. The semester’s partying ended more sedately with a Departmental Lunch for faculty, staff and graduate students held together with the staff of the Zimmerli Art Museum.

Christine Laidlaw, Ute Tellini, Greg Gilbert, Gail Levin and Hedy de Costa Nunes at the 50th Anniversary of the Graduate School-New Brunswick

The purposes of serving students and advancing scholarship work on many different levels in our Department. The very successful Curatorial Studies Certificate, which is now over fifteen years old at Rutgers, is much-emulated. Last year we reported on the conception of a new Historic Preservation Certificate, and in May it was fully< approved and set in operation for undergraduate and graduate students. (Courses are given by professors from Art History, from other departments of the University, and by visiting specialists.) As of this writing we have twelve undergraduate candidates formally enrolled for the certificate and about three times as many inscribed in our core courses. In addition, four graduate students are enrolled as certificate candidates and about thirty graduate students from various departments are taking our courses.

Further afield, the renowned summer program in Paris has for some years been taught exclusively on site by Seth Gopin and beginning in the summer of 2004, it will be enriched by a relationship developed with the Musée du Louvre. About one-third of the formal course instruction will now be devoted to the history and collections of the Louvre. Classes taught by senior members of the museum’s curators and staff will take up all aspects of the collections, research, display, and conservation, including the history and conservation of its buildings.

Encouraging a global outlook among our students has become an increasingly important part of the mission of the Department. We are strong participants in the new Italian Studies Program, which will enable students to create a personalized interdisciplinary major, combining art history with Italian language training and electives in the humanities. “ Italian Hours,” the cultural initiative of the program, has featured our department in, to date, a public lecture by Rona Goffen, and an exhibition in the Art Library of Sal Romano’s sculptures, which Joan Marter initiated and for which current grad student Mary Tinti wrote the catalog. Future events include a symposium on Galileo in Fall 2004, in which alum John Beldon Scott will present a paper.

In the Fall of 2004 we will also welcome a member of the Department of Art History at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, to teach a course on Dutch art. Soon, hopefully, a member of our faculty will be teaching in Utrecht. This initiative is the beginning of an extensive relationship between the two departments, which will involve the regular exchange of faculty and students, and the use of many facilities on both sides of the Atlantic for mutual benefit. Alumni may be able to take part in these activities, so stay tuned! In development is a Rutgers summer course on Netherlandish art at Utrecht, planned for 2005 to be taught from the monuments on site.

Finally, there is the report on faculty changes. Elsewhere in this Newsletter, John Scott contributes a moving obituary to a dear friend, teacher, and colleague, Olga Berendsen. Olga was an amazing figure – a demanding teacher, sensitive mentor, cooperative colleague, in short, a marvelous scholar and person. Everything she undertook was undertaken with gusto and complete devotion. In return she had the devotion of her associates and all those students who fell under her benevolent spell. We will sorely miss her.

Those who have kept up with the Department are aware of the effect of the retirements of 2001 and the effect they had on our curriculum. Last year, we welcomed Wendy Bellion in American art and began a search in Medieval art. In the midst of the search, the funding was abruptly but necessarily cancelled. Then, in the Fall of 2003, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Deans Holly Smith and Barry Qualls approved the revival of our Medievalist search. By general agreement, then, the faculty simply revived and continued the search process that had been initiated at the New York CAA meetings, and the result was our hiring of Erik Thunø. Erik is currently the Assistant Director of the Danish School in Rome. He is a distinguished specialist of Early Medieval Italian art, whose book Image and Relic, Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome, 2002, recently appeared in print. Erik, a native of Copenhagen, Denmark, will be teaching the Medieval sequence for undergraduates, advanced graduate seminars, and participating in the introductory survey beginning in the Fall, 2004.

Faculty searches represent a changing of the guard, and this is true of our program in Modern art. After more years at Rutgers than anyone else currently teaching, Jack Spector will be retiring. Jack has been a mainstay of the program, promoting its distinctions with his own lectures, publications, and visits, all over the world, from Europe to Asia. His first book was an analysis of Delacroix’s murals at Saint-Sulpice, published by the College Art Association (1967). Not long after he wrote on Delacroix’s “ Death of Sardanapalus” (1975), and between them he produced his most widely known volume, The Aesthetics of Freud (1972). This last book has been issued in German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese up to 1997, and a third edition is in progress. Jack’s Surrealist Art and Writing, 1919 to 1939 was published by Cambridge University Press (1997), and gives evidence of his abiding interest in problems of Surrealism. He edited two issues of American Imago and published articles on an astounding breadth of topics, from Duchamp and Magritte to Klee and Miro, and from psychoanalysis to Symbolism. Jack’s penetrating intelligence has left its healthy impression on over 40 years of students and faculty in the Department. In part because of his distinction and the luster he has brought to the program, we have been authorized to hire a new faculty member to assume many of his responsibilities as an undergraduate and graduate teacher and advisor. As Jack moves into retirement, he leaves a large legacy of many wonderful memories with us in New Brunswick and with his students all over the country. In this new phase of his activity we wish him all the best and hope that he will, like other retired faculty, come back often to visit. In the meantime we hope everyone of our readers will be encouraged to stay in touch with him and continue to stay in touch with the Department.

                                          Tod Marder

 

Department of Art History
Voorhees Hall
71 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel: 732-932-7041
Fax: 732-932-1261

Catherine Puglisi, Chairperson

Erik Thunø , Undergraduate Director

Susan Sidlauskas, Graduate Program Director

Cathy Pizzi, Department Administrator

Geralyn Colvil, Student Coordinator

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