Amy PowellPh.D., Harvard University, 2004, Art History A.B., UC Berkeley, 1996, Interdisciplinary Studies Email: amy.powell@uci.edu University of California Department of Art History 2220 Humanities Gateway Mail Code: 2785 Irvine, CA 92697 |
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Research Interests |
Northern European Art and Visual Culture 1300-1700 | |
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Research Abstract |
I teach and write about northern European art and visual culture from 1300-1700, with an emphasis on painting in the Netherlands. My theoretical concerns include allegory, untimeliness, repetition, and the ongoing challenge to art history posed by Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” My first book, "Perpetual Motifs: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum" (forthcoming from Zone Books) focuses on paintings and ritual re-enactments of the Deposition from the Cross. It describes how, on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, northern European images of the Deposition became allegories of the deposition of the image as such—allegories that gave measured form to the iconophobia of the late medieval church and prefigured the iconoclastic blows of the Protestant Reformation. And it traces the curious way in which this prefiguration prefigures in turn the repeated “deaths” of art since the invention of photography. Each chapter of the book ends with a vignette of a few pages devoted to a twentieth-century work of art, concept, or figure of speech that bears a pseudomorphic resemblance to some aspect of the late medieval Deposition scene. A demonstration of pseudomorphism’s surreal power to upset historical narratives is the central theoretical aim of the book and shapes its experimental form. A second book, "The Whitewashed Image: Iconoclasm and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscapes," is underway. It explores the belated impact of Protestant iconoclasm on the genre of landscape, and uncovers evidence of the traumatic events of 1566 in the emptiness and illegibility of works by artists including Hercules Seghers, Jan van Goyen, and Jacob van Ruisdael. |
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| Publications | Perpetual Motifs: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (forthcoming from ZONE BOOKS). | |
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"Caught Between Dispensations: Heterogeneity in Early Netherlandish Painting," Journal of Visual Culture 7.1 (2008): 83-101. |
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| "The Errant Image: Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition from the Cross and its Copies," Art History 29.4 (2006): 707-28. Reprinted in Location, (eds.) Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. | ||
| "A Point 'Ceaselessly Pushed Back:' The Origin of Early Netherlandish Painting," Art Bulletin 88.4 (2006): 540-62. | ||
| Grant | Getty Research Institute, Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2006-07; Columbia University, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History, 2004-06; Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C., Chester-Dale Fellowship, 2003-04; Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, Harvard University, 2000-01 | |
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5553 | |
| Last updated | 09/11/2009 | |