Vasari’s words o’ wisdom

I've been re-reading Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but this time the abridged E.L. Seeley translation of the main biographies in what was a three-volume mid-sixteenth-century work. You can read along too, thanks to the digitized edition at archive.org. Vasari is a standard reference for art historians, and...

Jackson’s Wars: pre-order!

You can now pre-order Jackson's Wars, scheduled for May 2022 publication, at a 20 percent discount! So why wouldn't you? Note that pre-orders must be done using the telephone number or the email address, using the discount code MQFA. Online orders can only be made once the book is released. Call 1-800-565-9523 or email utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca

“Uninvited”: by whom, and to what?

The exhibition catalogue for Uninvited There's a big exhibition now open to the public at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Movement runs until January 16, 2022. If you're at all interested in what Canadian artists period were producing, mainly in the between-war years, I would...

A.Y. Jackson and the Hallobobs

69 Hallowell Avenue in Montreal's Westmount neighbourhood While I was in Montreal last week, conducting interviews for a new project, I had the chance (that covid travel lockdowns had denied me) of swinging by an address that figures prominently in my forthcoming book Jackson's Wars. The three-storey row house at 69 Hallowell Avenue, on the...

Attack(s) of the suffragettes

In my earlier long post, Slashers in the Louvre, and the Beautiful Ideas That Kill, I wrote about a disturbing series of attacks on paintings in the Louvre in 1907. Readers may be interested to know (as I was) that leading British galleries suffered their own series of attacks in 1913-14, by suffragettes.

Copyedit complete!

I've just hit "send" on the final iteration of the copyedit of "Jackson's Wars" for McGill-Queen's University Press. This is a big brute of a manuscript – but very readable! – with a lot of finicky bits to the endnotes and bibliography. I've been working with the attentive copyeditor Robert Lewis, and the process has...