Michelle Kamhi
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Debunking Jasper Johns

January 31, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Art History / 16 Comments

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror—a mammoth two-part show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 13, 2022—is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Johns’s work. What entitles him to an exhibition of such unprecedented scope? In the Whitney’s exalted view (generally shared by the artworld mainstream): […]

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Jasper Johns, Leo Steinberg, meaningless "art", Robert Hughes

Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture

October 8, 2021 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History / 2 Comments

The double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, is an intriguing masterpiece by one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance. Most familiar to art lovers are its superb profile portraits of two notable early Renaissance personages. But it also comprises, on the […]

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Federico da Montefeltro, Piero della Francesca, Renaissance portraiture, Uffizi diptych

Revisiting Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait

November 17, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Art History / 3 Comments

In both Who Says That’s Art? and my blog post “How Not to Teach Art History” (reprinted in Bucking the Artworld Tide), I cited the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of Jan van Eyck’s famed double portrait in the National Gallery, London. Panofsky viewed the work as a marriage portrait, memorializing the private wedding […]

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Carola Hicks, Costanza Trenta, Erwin Panofsky, Giovanni Arnolfini, interpreting art, Jan van Eyck, Jeanne Cenami, Lorne Campbell, Margaret Koster, meaning in art, National Gallery - London, primary subject matter

Remembering Howard McP. Davis

October 20, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Contemporary art / 8 Comments

In early March, as New York was beginning to descend into its long, grim Covid-19 lockdown, I was unexpectedly cheered by a remarkable bit of art-related news. Columbia University announced the creation of the Howard McP. Davis Professorship of Art History. What made this news especially remarkable was that Davis had died more than a […]

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"Art History Gone Amuck", Arena Chapel - Padua, Art across Time, Columbia University, Giotto, Howard McP. Davis, Hunter College, Italian Renaissance painting, Laurie Schneider Adams, Piero della Francesca, Rudolf Wittkower

Art History Gone Amuck

October 2, 2020 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History / No Comments

Widely used art history textbooks such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages present a distorted narrative of visual art from the early twentieth century on. They focus on countless modernist and postmodernist inventions—from “abstract art” to “conceptual art” and “performance art”—at the expense of traditionally representational painting and sculpture.  The result is an utterly incoherent […]

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abstract art, Academic Questions (journal), avant-garde, conceptual art, Gardner's Art through the Ages, performance art, traditional art

Devotion to Drawing

August 7, 2018 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Exhibitions / 5 Comments

A legendary rivalry existed between the two megastars of nineteenth-century French painting: the arch-Romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)—the subject of an exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum, through November 12—and the inveterate classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).1 But on one thing they agreed: Drawing is the essential foundation of art. As Ingres famously declared, “Drawing is the probity […]

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Damien Hirst, Delacroix, drawing, Ingres, Metropolitan Museum, Raphael, Rubens

Michelangelo’s Humor

November 11, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, General / 6 Comments

The opening next week of the major exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art1 prompts me to post the following brief item about a little-known side of this master. The awe-inspiring grandeur of Michelangelo’s work earned him the reverent epithet of “Il Divino” among his contemporaries. It is therefore remarkable to […]

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How Not to Teach Art History

August 7, 2017 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education, Art History / 16 Comments

Just in time for a new school year, the September 2017 issue of Scholastic Art magazine features ten paintings that students should know, because they form part of “our collective cultural history.” Surely a worthwhile undertaking for a publication aimed at middle school and high school visual art education programs—until one examines the works selected […]

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10 Paintings to Know, Arnolfini Portrait, art education, avant-garde, Basquiat, cubism, Dora Maar in an Armchair, Grace Lin, Picasso, Scholastic Art

Valentin Who?—A Neglected French Master Spotlighted at the Met

October 19, 2016 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History, Exhibitions / 9 Comments

Valentin who? Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632), that’s who! But I must confess that I had never heard of this masterly painter before the landmark exhibition now at the Met, though I’ve been studying art history for more than half a century.1 Valentin achieved no small fame in his lifetime, however. Ranked high among the followers […]

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17th-century painting, Annick Lemoine, Beyond Caravaggio, Caravaggio, Counter Reformation art, Keith Christiansen, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum, Valentin de Boulogne

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About ‘For Piero’s Sake’

Who was Piero, and why was this title chosen? Read here.

Recent Posts

  • Debunking Jasper Johns
  • Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture
  • Lessons on Education from Books Our Children Read
  • Revisiting Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait
  • Remembering Howard McP. Davis

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