scholarly journals Becoming Leo. Steinberg e l'Institute of Fine Arts di New York: dall’eredità dei professori tedeschi allo sviluppo di un nuovo criticism

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
Daniele Di Cola

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow in 1920 but raised in Berlin and London, arrived in New York in January 1945. Trained as an artist in London in the early 1950s, when he was already in his thirties, he decided to study art history at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), where he was educated by Jewish-German refugee art historians such as Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz, and Erwin Panofsky. This essay reconsiders Steinberg’s work, which is well-known for its unconventional and revisionist inter- pretations, through the lens of his academic formation and the legacy of German Kunstwissenschaft in postwar America. Taking into account unpublished material (including university course notes and papers and an abandoned dissertation on the afterlife of Romanesque art), I point out how Steinberg’s first scholarly works, while respecting the methodologies of his professors, at the same time tried to “resist” their heritage. His engagement with contemporary art, for example, led him to challenge the biases of his professors, sometimes to their annoyance, as was the case with his Ph.D. dissertation on Borromini’s church of San Carlino, which was contested by his adviser Richard Krautheimer. The essay argues that during the IFA years Steinberg had already developed some of the concepts that would characterize his later intellectual trajectory: the dialogue between Old Master art and contemporary experience, the emphasis on the beholder’s physical and psychological response to artworks, the epistemological reevaluation of subjectivity, the priority of visual data over texts, and the hermeneutical validity of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning. Through these means, Steinberg achieved a personal synthesis between historical investigation and criticism, anticipat- ing the rethinking of the methodological tradition in the 1960s and 1970s.

Psychology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Devonis

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) took place at a time when the sources of authoritarianism and evil were a focal concern in psychology. It emerged from a tradition of activist social psychological research beginning with Solomon Asch in the 1940s and extending through Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the early 1960s. The SPE was a product of the research program of social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a member of the Stanford psychology faculty since 1968. Discussions among Zimbardo’s students in spring 1971 led to a plan to simulate a prison environment. They converted portions of the basement of a University building into a combination booking room and jail. Zimbardo and a number of his graduate and undergraduate students took on supervisory roles. Before the Experiment began, paid participants recruited through newspaper advertisements were screened to eliminate obvious psychopathology, then randomly assigned to either the role of ‘guard’ or ‘prisoner.’ On the first experimental morning August 14, 1971, actual local police simulated an arrest of each of the prisoner participants. After they arrived, blindfolded, a simulated booking took place. Guards escorted them to the prison hallway where prisoners were required to strip and exchange their clothing for simple shifts and slippers. After a simulated spray delousing, they entered makeshift cells. After this, the Experiment evolved as an extended improvisation, by both the guards and prisoners, on prison-related themes. Episodes of deprivation, bullying, and humiliation emerged unplanned. Originally planned to run for two weeks, the Experiment lasted only six days, prematurely terminated when its supervising personnel judged that the simulation had gotten out of their control. The coincidence of its termination with the Attica prison uprising in New York led to its immediate dissemination in the news. Since then the SPE has become one of the most iconic psychological studies of psychology’s modern era. Although intended to expose and ameliorate bad prison conditions, its effectiveness in this regard diminished during a rapid shift in US prison policy, in the mid-1970’s, from reform to repression. Over succeeding decades, the Experiment continued to stimulate the popular imagination, leading to an extensive replication on British television and its portrayal in two feature films. Soon after its original publication, the SPE attracted criticisms of its methodology. After 2010, critical scrutiny of the SPE as well as similar iconic studies from the 1960s and 1970s increased, fueled by the growing ‘replication crisis’ in psychology. This most recent phase of criticism reflects not just a turn toward reflexive disciplinary self-criticism but also the increased availability of archival sources for examination. The SPE continues to excite both passionate support and equally passionate obloquy, much as have other comparable simulations of human social behavior.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Jessica DuLong

This chapter provides a background of the waterborne evacuation that happened after the events of 9/11. New York harbor was, and is, a busy place — the third largest container port in the United States and a vital connection between New York City and the rest of the world. Manhattan is an island, and the realities of island real estate are what ushered the port's industries off Manhattan's shores and over to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s. By late 2001, maritime infrastructure had been replaced with ornamental fencing. On September 11, 2001, as the cascade of catastrophe unfolded, people found their fates altered by the absence of that infrastructure and discovered themselves dependent upon the creative problem solving of New York harbor's maritime community — waterfront workers who had been thrust beyond their usual occupations and into the role of first responders. Long before the U.S. Coast Guard's call for “all available boats” crackled out over marine radios, scores of ferries, tugs, dinner boats, sailing yachts, and other vessels had begun converging along Manhattan's shores. Hundreds of mariners shared their skills and equipment to conduct a massive, unplanned rescue. Within hours, nearly half a million people had been delivered from Manhattan by boat.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Nazir Nabaa, a respected Syrian painter, made his greatest contributions to Arab modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, when he contributed to the graphic identity of progressive political causes and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He joined the Syrian Communist Party in the 1954 and in 1959 was briefly jailed for this affiliation. After his release, he traveled to Cairo on a fellowship to study painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, there developing a heroic realist style around social and labor themes. After returning to Syria in 1964, Nabaa taught drawing in rural schools and worked with myth and folklife. Moving to Damascus in 1968, he worked as an illustrator and became involved in creative projects in support of political mobilization, including poster design, puppet theater, fine art painting, and art criticism. Between 1971 and 1975, Nabaa studied in Paris at the Academy of Fine Arts. Upon his return, he joined the faculty of the College of Fine Arts in Damascus. His later paintings became more fantastical, combining goddess figures with still lifes of fruits, tapestries, and jewelry. He also developed a parallel corpus of abstract paintings based on the exploration of texture and color.


2020 ◽  
pp. 232-245
Author(s):  
Tabatha Leggett

This chapter examines consciousness-raising as a means of challenging oppression. Bringing the #MeToo movement into contact with first-person accounts and criticisms of the radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that formed in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, it suggests that they remain an essential force to challenge female oppression today. It touches on the various ways that patriarchal structures silence women, how consciousness-raising undercuts this silencing by giving women a collective voice, and how social media can amplify this voice. Finally, it addresses common criticisms of consciousness-raising movements, especially concerning the disproportionate focus on white women’s concerns that they have historically represented and universalized. It touches on Kimberlé Crenhaw’s theory of intersectionality as well as Paulo Friere’s conception of critical consciousness theory to explore the notion of truly inclusive consciousness-raising movements.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
Claudia Roesch

This article investigates the role of the West German family planning association Pro Familia in the abortion reform of the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the question of legal abortion from the perspective of reproductive decision-making and asks who was to make a decision about having an abortion in the reform process—the woman, her doctor, or a counsellor. During the early reform suggestions of §218 in the 1960s, Pro Familia supported the West German solution of allowing legal abortion only in medical emergencies. Opinions within the organization changed as leading members witnessed legalization in Great Britain and New York. The feminist movement and the Catholic opposition to legal abortion influenced positions in the reform phase of the 1970s. Meanwhile, Pro Familia put emphasis on compulsory pregnancy crisis counselling as aid in decision-making for individual women and a tool for putting a decision into practice. Throughout the reform process, Pro Familia continued to perceive legal abortion not as way to enable women to make their own decision but as a pragmatic solution to emergencies.


2004 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-197
Author(s):  
Steve Benson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

All the problems on this month's calendar originally appeared in, or were adapted from, problems that came from New York Interscholastic Mathematics League contests in the 1960s and 1970s.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Lubek ◽  
Monica Ghabrial ◽  
Naomi Ennis ◽  
Sara Crann ◽  
Amanda Jenkins ◽  
...  

A “standard” historiographical overview of the development of health psychology in the United States, alongside behavioral medicine, first summarizes previous disciplinary and professional histories. A “historicist” approach follows, focussing on a collective biographical summary of accumulated contributions of one cohort (1967–1971) at State University of New York at Stony Brook. Foundational developments of the two areas are highlighted, contextualized within their socio-political context, as are innovative cross-boundary collaboration on “precursor” studies from the 1960s and 1970s, before the official disciplines emerged. Research pathways are traced from social psychology to health psychology and from clinical psychology to behavioral medicine.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Louay Kayyali was one of the leading painters of the emergent Syrian art scene during the 1960s and 1970s. His most admired works depict individual laborers as "types," illustrating the tragic humanism of everyday life. Kayyali began his career in Aleppo, exhibiting academic portraits and still life paintings locally. In 1956, he won a fellowship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he became interested in fresco and other traditional techniques. After completing his studies in 1961, Kayyali settled in Damascus and joined the faculty at the new College of Fine Arts. For a period of five years, he exhibited his portrait types, flowers, and architectural landscapes—rendered in simple lines and color stains on pressed chipboard—regularly, to acclaim from collectors. From 1965 onward, Kayyali began to struggle with mental illness. In this later period, he turned to more overtly politicized themes, including a series of dramatic charcoal drawings of citizens under siege, which was sponsored by the Syrian government as a touring exhibition in support of the Arab liberation cause. He also continued to produce paintings of fishermen, street sellers, and mothers as representations of the social themes then preoccupying him.


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