Professor Elizabeth C. Childs
This past year, Prof. Childs completed an essay on strategies of primitivism in Gauguin’s sculpture for A Fine Regard (Ashgate Press) in honor of her late professor, Kirk Varnedoe, and continued work on a book project on visual culture in Tahiti, and fin-de-siècle exoticism. Her new projects include two major exhibitions—first, one on Gauguin’s art in relation to the Polynesian art and culture of his time, which will be held in 2009 at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and second, an exhibition devoted to the work of John La Farge in the South Seas, to be held at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2010. The latter will celebrate the discovery of La Farge’s missing sketchbooks, recently acquired by the Y.U.A.G., which offer important new insights into the trip he and American historian Henry Adams made to Polynesia in 1891.

In 2006, Prof. Childs delivered a talk at Duke University, at a symposium on public sculpture at the new Nasher Museum. She also delivered a paper on fin-de-siècle exoticism and colonialism at the Western Society for French History meetings in Santa Barbara. In May 2006, she escorted a group of Washington University alumni to Provence, and conducted tours through the museums and landscape sites central to the career of painter Paul Cézanne, in this year of observing the centenary of the artist’s death. This coming academic year (2007-2008), she will be giving talks on Daumier and the cultural politics of caricature at University of Missouri-Columbia and Rutgers University (Zimmerli Museum), and a talk on Henry Adams and the Salmon/Teva family in Tahiti, concerning “Identity, gifting and the formation of collections in fin-de-siècle Tahiti,” for the international art history conference CIHA, in Melbourne Australia, 2008.

In summer 2007, she assumed the position of Chair, and looks forward to serving the Department in this role. She is also serving the university more broadly on the Faculty Senate Council (A and S at-large representative).

Professor Paul Crenshaw
Professor Crenshaw’s book Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art World in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. This study examines the causes and effects of Rembrandt’s declaration of insolvency in 1656. More broadly, it is an exemplary biographic, sociological and economic study of an artist’s creative management of his career, and the circumstances that befell him due to his challenges to patronage relationships and insistent autonomy.

In the Fall of 2006 the exhibition Rembrandt: Master Etchings from St. Louis Collections was held at the St. Louis Art Museum to celebrate the artist’s four-hundredth anniversary. The excellent holdings of Rembrandt prints in local public and private collections were brought together for the exhibition and catalogue co-authored by Prof. Crenshaw and Francesca Herndon-Consagra, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the St. Louis Art Museum. Prof. Crenshaw delivered a paper at the accompanying symposium.

Professor Crenshaw’s current project is a book entitled Calumny: Themes of Patronage and Criticism in Rembrandt’s work. This book will include new interpretations of the artist’s major paintings for the Sicilian patron Don Antonio Ruffo, as well as new findings on several other important works by Rembrandt. He has recently delivered two papers related to this project at the annual College Art Association meetings, and one at the Frick Collection in New York.

Prof. Crenshaw is the lead author of the book Secrets & Symbols: Decoding the Great Masters, to be published by Rizzoli in 2008. This book examines the phenomenon of creation and reception of symbolic formulas, primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque period.

Visiting Lecturer John Curley
Fall 2007 Visiting Lecturer John Curley recently received his Ph.D. from Yale University for his dissertation “The Art that Came in from the Cold: Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, 1950-1968.” This work was awarded the Francis Blanshard Prize for outstanding History of Art dissertation. Additionally, in January he spoke at the interdisciplinary “Propaganda and Mass Culture in the Making of Cold War Europe” conference in Dublin. And in February, he presented a paper at “Gerhard Richter: A Symposium” at the Getty Research Institute, which focused on new directions in Richter scholarship. The Getty will publish the proceedings from this conference in 2008.

Currently, he is working on an article based on his dissertation research and catalogue entries for the upcoming “German Art during the Cold War” exhibition (organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art). He is also preparing to give papers this fall at the German Studies Association annual conference in San Diego and at “Contemporary/Modern: Andy Warhol, Twenty Years After” at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.


Professor Rebecca DeRoo
Rebecca DeRoo's book The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in 1968 France appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2006.  It explains how the political protests of 1968 in France triggered a redefinition of museums and artistic practice.  Her new research project focuses on celebrated filmmaker Agnes Varda, and is titled Agnes Varda and the French New Wave.  A portion of this work was presented last spring at the College Art Association Annual Conference in a paper "Unhappily Ever After: Agnes Varda's Happiness and The Myth of the Loving Housewife."  In April 2007 Professor DeRoo co-chaired two panels with Jill Carrick, "1968: Activist Art and Its Legacies," at the Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, in Belfast, Ireland. In 2006, she taught a new course, Feminist Art and Theory 1970s to the Present.  She also enjoyed working with our art history and archaeology majors as Director of Undergraduate Studies.


Professor Angela Miller
Angela Miller completed a decade of work with the October 2007 publication of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity. She led a team of six scholars of American art, including specialists in American Indian and contemporary fields, on this survey, which will be jointly released by Prentice-Hall as a trade book. In the past year, Professor Miller gave lectures relating to the new turn toward a “global” approach to the study of American art, in Beijing, Washington, D.C., the University of Illinois, Hamburg, and Berlin. She gave invited lectures on a range of other topics at the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, and at the College Art Association in New York City. The past year also saw the publication of articles on painting and photography, western art, and the environmental context of landscape painting. In May 2006 she was pleased to receive an award for Faculty Mentoring from the Graduate School. She is teaching in Florence this Fall, for the university’s Overseas Study program in Art History. In November she will give the Terra Foundation's sponsored lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival, on landscape painting and environmental thinking.

Professor Susan Rotroff
Professor Rotroff has been continuing her work on the pottery from the SEEP (Southern Euboia Exploration Project) survey. She spent two weeks in the summer of 2007 at Karystos, on the Greek Island of Euboia, finalizing the text of the pottery catalogue. Last April she presented a controversial paper in Athens at a conference on Greek painted pottery, suggesting that the beginnings of the red-figure style be downdated; the paper will be published in the conference proceedings. Another paper, delivered in St. Louis as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the St. Louis society of the Archaeological Institute of America, focused on the little-known Greek pottery in the Kemper Art Museum; although almost never exhibited, the vases are fine specimens of Greek art and also constitute a valuable teaching resource. Public lectures at U. of Missouri and U. of Kansas focused on the Bone Well project, an ongoing collaboration with colleagues in anthropology and zooarchaeology on the contents of a Hellenistic well that served as the final resting place for
450 infants. Other work includes the completion of an article on Pottery for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, and participation in the excavation of the Kizilburun ship, which sank off the coast of Turkey around 100 BCE

Professor William Wallace
Professor Wallace's biography, Michelangelo: The Man, His Life and Times, will be published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2009, In 2008, he was the Jeannette Watson Visiting Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University and completed an 18-hour DVD lecture course, “The Genius of Michelangelo,” for The Teaching Company which specializes in packaging “Great Courses” by “Great Professors.” In the last two years, Professor Wallace has published essays in Festschriften honoring James Beck and Andrew Ladis, he wrote a chapter in the forthcoming book, Florence in the Cambridge University Press series, “Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance,” and he published four brief notes in Source. In addition, he delivered the Holbrook Lecture at the University of Georgia at Athens, and the Norman and Jane Geske Lecture at the University of Nebraska, and he gave talks at the British Museum, the Aspen Institute (Aspen CO), Florida State University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Memphis. In 2007, he was elected to a four-year term on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association.


Affiliated Faculty News

Professor Eric Mumford
Eric Mumford, Associate Professor in the College of Architecture, has just published Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937-69 with Yale University Press. He also lectured at the "Reassessing Rudolph" symposium at the Yale School of Architecture on Jan. 24; at the "On the Riverfront: St Louis and the Gateway Arch" symposium at Washington University on Jan. 31; and at "The Artist and the Architect: Hofmann and Sert" at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University on Feb. 9.