Art History

Everybody loves to love the Impressionists -- think of their shimmering colors, pretty girls, handsome men and bucolic landscapes, all rendered in a serviceable evergreen style you don't have to have an advanced degree in art history to appreciate. PISSARRO: CREATING THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE / / Through May 13 / / The Baltimore Museum of Art / / 443-573-1700 or artbma.org

Movie actor Vincent Price, who in his offscreen life was a passionate art lover and collector, entitled his memoirs "I Know What I Like," a phrase that summed up the attitude of connoisseurs in the days before art history was a subject routinely taught to college undergraduates.At the turn of the century, knowing what one liked meant making the grand tour of Europe to study the great masterpieces of the past, then judiciously applying that knowledge and experience to the development of one's own judgment and taste.

A director of a New York university gallery known for her ability to communicate with both artists and audiences has been hired by the Baltimore Museum of Art to curate contemporary art exhibitions and to oversee the reinstallation of the museum's contemporary art wing.Helen Molesworth, an assistant professor and the director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, will begin her new job in January. She will step into a curatorial position unfilled since early 1998 -- when Brenda Richardson resigned after holding the job for 23 years.

The longtime chairman of art history has been appointed dean of arts and sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, assuming leadership of a school that has been troubled by the defection of distinguished faculty members.Herbert L. Kessler, the Charlotte Bloomberg professor of art history, was approved as dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences during a telephone conference yesterday of the executive committee of the university's board of trustees.Kessler is the second new dean announced this week.

The longtime chairman of art history has been appointed dean of arts and sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, assuming leadership of a school that has been troubled by the defection of distinguished faculty members.Herbert L. Kessler, the Charlotte Bloomberg professor of art history, was approved as dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences during a telephone conference yesterday of the executive committee of the university's board of trustees.Kessler, 56, is the second new dean announced this week.

To look at Georgia O'Keeffe 81 times through the lens of Alfred Stieglitz is to watch someone you thought you knew slowly become an enigma.Gone is the flinty-looking, aged icon of the Southwest, our image of O'Keeffe for decades before her death in 1986. In its place, Stieglitz gives us a much younger O'Keeffe, in photographs taken between 1917 and 1937. More important, the O'Keeffe he presents is not a single entity, but a prismatic, multifaceted presence.The 81 photographs are presented as a single work of art. Called "Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz," it is on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.It stands as one of the most unusual portraits in all of art history, and more besides: It is also a drama of human emotion as revealed by the human body, a record of one of the century's great love affairs, a set of variations on early 20th-century modernism, and a successful collaboration by two of the era's most famous artists.

We are spending a month or two in France and would like information on art schools or studios that offer painting and ceramics courses in English. What time of year would be best?The summer months offer the best opportunities for English-speakers to study art in Paris as well as in the provinces.In Pont-Aven, the village on the Brittany coast where Gauguin painted, Caroline Boyle-Turner, an art historian at the Rhode Island School of Design, runs summer art courses for English-speaking students at the Pont-Aven School of Art. The classes -- in painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, French and art history -- have six to 12 students.

Doug Baldwin has made a career of ducks. His ceramic sculptures all have ducks in them, and the subjects of his art include everything from art college to art history. If it's not too much of a contradiction in terms, Baldwin's creations are subtly hilarious. You giggle internally, if not necessarily out loud.Right now, he's having a show called "Duck Art History Revised" at Baltimore Clayworks. Every piece is a reproduction of a famous work of art history -- Munch's "The Scream," van Gogh's "Bedroom in Arles," Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" -- with a duck, or ducks, in each one. You should go. You owe yourself a giggle.

For decades, the huge Tiepolo painting hung in a prominent position at the top of the Walters Art Gallery's grand staircase. Despite its impressive size -- 9 feet by 16 feet -- it was largely ignored by visitors and art scholars.Then, one day in 1993 the roof leaked right on it.And the Tiepolo was launched on a restoration odyssey that would reclaim its original vibrant beauty and place it among the most important examples of the great 18th-century painter's early works.The newly restored painting -- a colorful, dramatic work depicting an event in Roman history -- and its tale of redemption go on view today in the exhibit "Tiepolo Unveiled: The Restoration of a Masterpiece."

MONTGOMERY, ALA. -- Climb three steps onto the wide front porch filled with broken chairs and an upended mattress, walk through the worn sitting room, step into what should be the living room. For a moment, it is too dim to see anything.Then, there he is -- Mose Tolliver sits as if on a throne, on the edge of a big metal bed. The shades are drawn. Blasts of air whoosh from an antique gas stove. As the eyes adjust, the cautious movements of small brown roaches are apparent. And everywhere are paintings: vivid splashes against bright pink walls.

David Winfield Scott, a noted American artist and author and former Eastern Shore resident who was the founding director of the National Museum of American Art, died of multiple organ failure Monday at an Austin, Texas, hospice. He was 92. Dr. Scott was born in Fall River, Mass., and raised in Claremont, Calif., where his father was a professor at Pomona College. After graduating from the Webb School in Claremont, he studied painting with Millard Sheets, a prominent California watercolorist, who became a formative influence on the young artist.

A bright winter sun streams into a room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, far removed from the public galleries. Her eyes dense with concentration, Angie Elliott picks up what looks like a long toothpick and winds a small clump of cotton around its point, an improvised Q-tip, and dips it into a bottle of ethanol. Bending over a table, Elliott uses the damp tool to gently swab the surface of an ornate 16th-century chamfron, a piece of steel armor with inlays of gold and silver, made to protect a horse's forehead and nose in battle.

A hundred years ago, people were still debating whether photography was art. Fifty years later, the debate was over, but photography's victory was meager: It remained for years afterward the orphan stepchild of the museum and gallery world. Ironically, photography, the quintessential art of the modern era, didn't really get its due until Modernism was overthrown in the 1970s by a new generation of Postmodern artists, who upended its time-honored conventions and turned it into a cutting-edge contemporary art medium.

Dr. Theodore E. Klitzke, former dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he had also been acting president, died Sunday of complications from a stroke at Manor Care Ruxton. He was 92. Dr. Klitzke was born and raised in Chicago. He attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago from 1934 to 1936 and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1939. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1941 from the University of Chicago and studied at the Institute of Art and Archaeology of the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre from 1947 to 1948.

Everybody loves to love the Impressionists -- think of their shimmering colors, pretty girls, handsome men and bucolic landscapes, all rendered in a serviceable evergreen style you don't have to have an advanced degree in art history to appreciate. PISSARRO: CREATING THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE / / Through May 13 / / The Baltimore Museum of Art / / 443-573-1700 or artbma.org

Nancy Ellen Forgione, a Johns Hopkins University faculty member who created a course on the history and art of walking, died of sepsis Sunday at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Roland Park resident was 54. Born in Baltimore and raised in Govans, she attended St. Mary of the Assumption Parochial School and was a 1970 graduate of Western High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in humanities at the Johns Hopkins University and met her future husband, Sun reporter Michael Hill, while they were students there.

NEW YORK -- A new and powerfully beautiful exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum does something that similar presentations almost never do. The established way we think about a pivotal artist gets turned inside out, and the revision is right on target. No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper says something essential - and in previously unconsidered ways. Curator Susan Davidson erases the conventional distinction between drawing and painting in the classic works Pollock made with the drip method.

Gregor and the Marks of Secret Suzanne Collins Masterpieces Up Close Western Painting from the 14th to 20th Centuries Claire d'Harcourt Chronicle / $22.99 / Ages 10-14 This book is not designed as a run-up-your-SAT-score primer. Claire d'Harcourt makes intriguing fun out of art history's material. There are 10 or so questions, on 21 images, asking readers to notice and read the small details. The answers - and some are quite tentative and preliminary - don't come until later, so there's no open-and-shut feeling of art-history-as-flash-cards.

Judging by the volume of mail, e-mails and phone calls I received this week, Baltimoreans hold dear their Penn Station and are mightily unhappy about anything that interferes with its majestic setting. "There are scores of people who agree wholeheartedly with ... Mr. [Frank] Wrabel. When this abomination was erected, there were outcries from many," wrote Frances W. Riepe in a letter. "I wrote letters to the editor of your paper and had a lot of response. I contacted people in the art world including the former head of the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute.

Elizabeth C. Oswald a former court clerk and artist, died of brain cancer Thursday at her home in Curtis Bay. She was 71. She was born Elizabeth Carozza in Catonsville and graduated from Notre Dame Preparatory School in 1952 and from Trinity College in Washington in 1956 with a degree in art history. In 1957, she married Woodin H. Oswald Sr. and spent the next 20 years raising her four children. An art lover who enjoyed sketching, watercolors and pottery, she received her master's degree in art history from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1974.