The Art Bulletin
Volume XCIV Number 1 March 2012

Editor’s Note 7

Regarding Art and Art History ANNE M. WAGNER 8
Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism ELIZABETH KING, J. M. BERNSTEIN, 10
CAROLYN DEAN, CAROLINE VAN ECK,
FINBARR BARRY FLOOD, DARIO
GAMBONI, JANE GARNETT AND
GERVASE ROSSER, JAMES MEYER, MIYA
ELISE MIZUTA, ALINA PAYNE

Interview
Two Are Better than One: Notes on the Interview and Techniques of Multiplication JULIA GELSHORN 32

“Curiosity Is the Motor of the Entire Interview Project”: Hans Ulrich Obrist in
Conversation with Philip Ursprung PHILIP URSPRUNG 42

Articles
Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshu¯’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495 YUKIO LIPPIT 50
Splashed Ink Landscape by the Zen monk-painter Sesshu¯ To¯yo¯ (1420–1506?) embodies a complex relation between medieval Japanese ink painting and artistic subjectivity. A careful study of the history and semantics of splashed ink and the painting’s inscriptions reveals Sesshu¯’s work to be a multifaceted pictorial artifact that reflects how monk-painters during Japan’s medieval period imagined artistic transmission in terms of a spiritual bloodline. It also demonstrates how using the splashed ink mode to formalize such transmission allowed the monk-painter to be cast as a cultivated gentleman according to classical literati aesthetic discourse.

Henry Fuseli: Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism ANDREI POP 78
The wash drawings and oil paintings of subjects from Greek tragedy by Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), routinely categorized as romantic classicism, might be better explained in terms of the contemporary revival of Greek tragedy, made possible by the philosophical anthropology of Johann Gottfried von Herder and David Garrick’s theater of character. From this climate of experimentation with foreign cultures arose a morally detached spectator and a critique of Eurocentrism in the era of Captain Cook and the American Revolution. Fuseli’s classicism thus played its part in the formation of the modern liberal version of cultural pluralism.

Agent Provocateur? The African Origin and American Life of a Statue from Côte d’Ivoire MONICA BLACKMUN VISONA 99
A biography of a statue sculpted in or near the Lagoon region of Cote d’Ivoire reveals how her “social life” has become entangled with American art history. Created to address spiritual beings in her homeland, she was purchased by Paul Guillaume in France and was exhibited by Alfred Stieglitz and Marius de Zayas in New York in 1914. Donated to Fisk University by Georgia O’Keeffe in 1949, she has engaged in a dialogue with African American artists. In all of these interactions, the figure has been not a passive object but an active agent of cultural change.

Reviews
Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture SHEILA DILLON 130

Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late
Medieval France JULIAN GARDNER 132

Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance GERHARD WOLF 135

Walter S. Melion, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print (1550–1625) MARC FUMAROLI 141

Reviews Online 144
Recent Books in the Arts listings are now available online within caa.reviews at
www.caareviews.org.