Volume 13, Number 1, 2004
Profs. H. Perry Chapman and Ann Eden Gibson specialize in areas of art history that are separated by three centuries and the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, but the two have something in common.
Both have been awarded 2004 Guggenheim Fellowships to pursue their research, Chapman in 17th-Century Dutch painting and Gibson in 20th-Century American abstract expressionism.
"To have two Guggenheim winners in one year is a great honor for any department, especially one as small as ours," Michael Leja, Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and chairperson of the department, says. He notes that two other art history professors, Nina Kallmyer and Larry Nees, previously won the fellowships, making one-third of the department faculty current or former Guggenheim honorees.
Chapman says her teaching and research take an interdisciplinary approach that links such fields as history, literature, politics, economics and religion to art and artists. She will use the fellowship to continue work on a book, The Painter's Place in the Dutch Republic, 1604-1718. The book, she says, will bring together research she has been conducting for 25 years to "address what it meant to be an artist in the 17th Century."
That time period in The Netherlands is especially interesting, Chapman says, because art had changed, from being created for church or royal patrons to, instead, focusing on the home and domestic scenes. Self-portraits and images of the artist's studio--many of them idealized or fanciful--became common, she says.
"I do a lot of interdisciplinary thinking, about the politics or the economics of 17th-Century art, for example," Chapman says. "Looking at economics is a new direction art history is taking, and it's especially strong in Dutch art."
Her interdisciplinary interests also influence her teaching. She and Leja recently team-taught a seminar on illusion and trompe l'oeil painting, a style that she says was a perfect topic for such a cross-cultural course because it was popular in both 19th-Century American and 17th-Century Dutch art.
Whatever subject she is teaching, Chapman says, "I love it. I love teaching grad students, where you can get into a lot of discussions, and undergraduates, where you really are helping to develop their critical thinking skills."
Chapman is the author of Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in 17th-Century Identity and of numerous articles on Rembrandt, Jan Steen, art theory and biography and the artistic impact of the Dutch Revolt. She recently completed four years as editor of The Art Bulletin, and she has a fellowship next year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.
Gibson, whose current research focuses on the cross-cultural experiences of artists, is conducting research for a book about the diasporic images of African-American painter and muralist Hale Woodruff. She says her interest in the subject began while she was researching her doctoral dissertation at UD and came across artists who were women, African-American or from other, non-European ethnic backgrounds with whom she had been unfamiliar.
"Their work looked quite good to me, and I started wondering why you never heard about them," Gibson says. "As it turned out, I was in the right place at the right time to do research on them, because it was the '70s, and the art world was opening up to broader possibilities."
Woodruff, who grew up in Tennessee in the early 1900s and later worked and taught in Atlanta, was an abstract expressionist who was known to African-American scholars but largely overlooked by the broader art world, Gibson says. Her book, tentatively titled Hale Woodruff: A Life and Work Across Cultures, will explore his life as well as examining how his experiences of moving from place to place in America and Europe is registered in his art, she says.
"In the 1980s and '90s, there came to be a lot of diasporic literature of all types--in sociology, psychology, comparative literature--in addition to art history," Gibson says. "People work out of their own life experiences, and those experiences are complex and different for everyone."
Her research will include seeking out and interviewing Woodruff's students and others who knew him, she says, because no complete biography of him exists.
Gibson is the author of the books Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals and Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics and numerous journal articles. She has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian and the Getty Research Institute.
Gibson and Chapman are among 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected this year from more than 3,200 applicants as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's 80th annual award winners.
Ann L. Ardis, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says the awards recognize the two professors' "distinguished records of scholarship--and the promise of the projects they currently have under way." She called the selection "a great honor" for the recipients and also for the department, the College and the University.
--Ann Manser, AS '73, CHEP '73