Research and Innovation

The Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships are intended to support research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts of any geographical area and of any period.

An ancient viewer exiting Herculaneum's Central Baths onto the Cardo IV Superiore could see, across the street, a house whose entrance opened onto a striking vista framed by the fauces and the line of sight offered by successive openings into the atrium, tablinum, and beyond - to a polychrome mosaic decorating the east wall of the house's rear courtyard. This mosaic, depicting Neptune and Amphitrite, gives the house its name and is the subject of this chapter. This essay seeks to use the decoration of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite at Herculaneum in order to explore the decorative program's multivalent strategies with which to engage the Roman viewer; and to articulate aspects of the patron's personal and family identity as revealed through decoration. Therefore, the polychrome mosaic featuring Neptune and Amphitrite is examined first within the space of the home, and then within its regional and cultural contexts.

The exhibition, The Poet's Brush: Chinese Ink Paintings by Lo Ch'ing, curated by UMD professor Jason Kuo, brings 30 artworks to the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC for the artist's first show in the US in ten years. Representing 4 decades of the artist's work, the selection ranges from his smaller, poetic compositions of the late 1960s all the way to his monumental, post-modern landscapes of 2015. Working in the millennia-old tradition of Chinese ink art, Lo's paintings include familiar landscape forms of the genre, such as mountains, clouds and river scenes, but he updates this hallowed pictorial language with his own idiosyncratic vocabulary - one that includes an array of modern symbols like airplanes, icons, asphalt and skyscrapers - and aerial views impossible in ancient times.

Advancing a Different Modernism analyzes a long-ignored but formative aspect of modern architecture and art. By examining selective buildings by the Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1850-1923) and by the Slovenian designer Jože Plecnik (1872-1957), the book reveals the fundamental political and ideological conservatism that helped shape modernism’s history and purpose. This study thus revises the dominant view of modernism as a union of progressive forms and progressive politics. Instead, this innovative volume promotes a nuanced and critical consideration of how architecture was creatively employed to advance radically new forms and methods, while simultaneously consolidating an essentially conservative nationalist self-image.

While mapping his biography from his childhood in Peru to his death in the Marquesas Islands, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) examines his artistic development through the style and content of specific works at the intersection of his personal experiences and spiritual transformation. As it tracks the evolution of his career from a self-taught Sunday painter to a seminal force shaping the direction of modern art, it explores how his unorthodox approach to materials and techniques stimulated his radical innovations—mutually reinforced by his experiments as painter, sculptor, ceramist, draftsman, printmaker, and author. 

Professor Shannon's 2017 book, The Recording Machine: Art and Fact During the Cold War (Yale University Press) offers a new understanding of the transformation of the visual arts around 1968. Uncovering a stringent realism in the period's art, this book traces many artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of mere facts and surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates its relationship to the Cold War's preoccupation with data as well as the longer rise of a pervasive culture of fact. The book focuses on the United States and West Germany, closely reading works ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. The Recording Machine is the winner of a Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant.

The significance of the sculptural decoration of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi has long been debated. This article demonstrates that the sculptural program is not only an early example of a newfound emphasis on Theseus as the particular hero of Athens, but that it is indicative of an effort to create visual parity between the deeds of Theseus and those of Herakles. The Athenian Treasury is, therefore, the first building to use mythic imagery involving Theseus, Herakles, and their battles against the Amazons as a sophisticated allusion to conflict with Persia and to the decisive role of Athens at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The mythological themes elaborated in the treasury's decoration ingeniously predicate ancient parallels for contemporary events. My reevaluation of the Athenian Treasury's decoration invites us to reassess the intersections between art, life, and myth in the aftermath of momentous world events like Marathon.

How have Blacks been understood in Japan and represented in Japanese art? What role did the representation of Blacks perform in the construction of Japan’s own racialized identity vis-a-vis both blackness and whiteness? How did the Japanese artistic diaspora in the United States, as part of an Asian minority subject to discrimination—including Japanese and Japanese-Amerian incarceration during World War II—approach the subject? Covering a period of approximately two hundred years, from the early 19th century to the early 21st century, this essay is the first study of its kind and provides a basis for the consideration of the racialized nature of Japanese art and modern art more generally.

Modernism in Havana reached its climax during the turbulent years of the 1950s as a generation of artists took up abstraction as a means to advance artistic and political goals in the name of Cuba Libre. During a decade of insurrection and, ultimately, revolution, abstract art signaled the country's cultural worldliness and its purchase within the international avant-garde. This pioneering book offers the first in-depth examination of Cuban art during that time, following the intersecting trajectories of the artist groups Los Once and Los Diez against a dramatic backdrop of modernization and armed rebellion. Abigail McEwen explores the activities of a constellation of artists and writers invested in the ideological promises of abstraction, and reflects on art's capacity to effect radical social change. Featuring previously unpublished artworks, new archival research, and extensive primary sources, this remarkable volume excavates a rich cultural history with links to the development of abstraction in Europe and the Americas.

Unlike the work of his contemporaries Rubens and Caravaggio, who painted on a grand scale, seventeenth-century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel’s tiny, detail-filled paintings took their place not in galleries but among touchable objects. This first book-length study of his work investigates how educated beholders valued the experience of refined, miniaturized artworks in Baroque Europe, and how, conversely, Brueghel’s distinctive aesthetic set a standard—and a technique—for the production of inexpensive popular images.