Dr. Bellow’s Review Widely Viewed On CAA Website

In celebration of the College Art Association’s 100th birthday, the caa.reviews editorial board presented the top “readers’ picks,” one for each year of publication.  To identify the most popular reviews, CAA used statistics from Google Analytics beginning in 2007, when they first became available for the site, through 2010. This enabled CAA to see the total number of hits on individual reviews over the course of three years.  Dr. Bellow’s article Surveying the “Long Nineteenth Century”: A Review of Art-History Textbooks in the Field, was one of the most viewed articles of 2007.  In her article, Dr. Bellow analyzes the four major 19^th century art history text books that were published between 1984 and 2006.  These textbooks were written by Robert  Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, Lorenz Eitner, Stephen Eisenman, and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu.  CAA editor Laura Auricchio noted that many of the readers who made Bellow’s the most visited review of 2007 were probably faculty members in search of guidance on what book to assign for their class.  However, Bellow goes beyond a mere summary of the textbooks, instead using her review to question the prevailing assumptions behind nineteenth century historiography.   Bellow asks questions such as “What do we mean when we say “the nineteenth century”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What does it contain or exclude? How do we make such choices—on what basis?”  To read Dr. Bellow’s article for yourself visit the review at- http://www.caareviews.org/centennial/2007