Caspar David Friedrich

I currently find myself residing at a house in a rural German village tucked into the corner where Germany meets the Czech Republic and Poland. It’s a region where one of my first art historical loves, Caspar David Friedrich, often wandered. He captured the rolling hills, distinguished by pale nuances even at sunset, in many of his paintings, although Cross in the Mountains (painted in 1808 and now in Dresden) depicts the nearby, pointier, red sandstone peaks a few kilometers southeast….

Vision: Motif from Visby

Richard Bergh, Vision: Motif from Visby, 1894. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

As a staunch Social Democrat from the bourgeoisie, Bergh hoped to dissolve social demographic barriers, establish common ground, and generate empathy among social layers…

Vanishing Social Spaces

Recently, I sat in my office preparing a lecture. New slide, copy, paste, insert text. Powerpoint transformed the lives of art historians when it was introduced at colleges and universities circa 2000. It was revolutionary, life-changing, for that discipline in ways unknown to scholars in other fields. Some older art historians even retired earlier than… Continue reading Vanishing Social Spaces