The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association ed. by Susan Ball (review)

For many of us, our relationship with the College Art Association (CAA) centers around the organization's annual meeting, that cacophonous yearly ritual that sees job applicants, panelists, and old friends and colleagues descend upon a convention hotel for one long weekend in February. The recent publication The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, edited by former CAA executive director Susan Ball, attempts to historicize not only this event but the entire range of the association's activities over its long life. Additionally, it serves as a reminder to all of us that the organization has long engaged in a wide range of pursuits that extend well beyond planning its annual conference. As a learned society, it has served as a conceptual meeting point for scholars of visual culture; as a publisher, it has offered the journal of record for the field of art history, The Art Bulletin; and as a leading arts organization, it has functioned as a useful advocate for its members on thorny issues such as freedom of speech and copyright law. This history offers historians of the history of art a glimpse into the field's mercurial character over the past century, as seen through the lens of one of its most visible institutions. The story that emerges is of an organization at pains to keep up with significant changes that have rocked the field in the modern era, at times holding steadfastly to a conservative notion of what is considered proper to the discipline as a whole.

The Eye, the Hand, the Mind is organized thematically, each of its twelve chapters devoted to a different set of the organization's main charges, as established by the association's charter. These essays, authored largely by former members of the board of directors of the association or staff members, range in focus from the organization's role in promoting the work of American artists through association-sponsored exhibitions to publishing advanced art historical scholarship to establishing a set of best practices for how universities and the organization itself answer to diverse constituencies. These essays draw heavily on minutes and transcripts from CAA board meetings, interviews with those who held leadership positions within the organization, and extensive research into the various journals published by the association over its lifetime. It is not possible to summarize the history of each of the association's stated purposes, as laid out in the volume. However, some intriguing themes emerge throughout the various authors' histories. It is my attempt to single out a handful of these, as they offer the possibility for future research into what remain some knotty institutional and aesthetic dilemmas.

Craig Houser 's essay "The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA's Publishing Program" presents a remarkably thorough account of the association's print and online journals, and, in so doing, traces the remarkable ebbs and flows of visual arts scholarship over the past century. Of particular note is how various movements and historical epochs fall in and out of favor with art scholars. Interestingly, medieval and gothic topics predominated in the early years of the Art Bulletin, reflecting the interests of those in positions of authority within the organization. Starting in the mid-1930s, however, articles devoted to the art of the Renaissance soon rose to prominence in the journal's pages, due in no small part to the influx of German scholars who fled their homeland after the Nazi seizure of power and whose scholarly pursuits focused overwhelmingly on the Renaissance era. As a periodical that soon came to be thought of as the "journal of record" for the field of art history, the Art Bulletin played, and continues to play, a key role in defining the state of the discipline. The periodic shifts in emphasis within the journal tell us that the contours of the field are often shaped by extraneous forces. Yes, movements do fall in and...