Affiliated Books

In the past few decades, several major exhibitions and scholarly publications have revisited the distinguished career of American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980), a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1949 and a resident there in 1960 and again in 1971. Once known as “Abstract Expressionism’s odd-man out,” a respected, but often misunderstood, member of the New York School, Guston is now celebrated for his magisterial paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. Combining painterly virtuosity and narrative power, they cast a long shadow over the current landscape of contemporary art.

In light of both a profusion of recent scholarship and the lasting currency of Guston’s vision among artists working today, the time appears right to take stock of his career. To that end, the American Academy in Rome organized a two-day conference with an international roster of critics and art historians to discuss the significance and critical fortunes of Guston’s work, paying special attention to his life-long attentiveness to Italian art and culture.

Emerging out of that symposium are the texts in Go Figure! They reflect a wide variety of perspectives, including reflections from leading specialists and several of Guston’s longtime friends and collaborators, as well as those by younger scholars, who have paved new ground in recent studies of Guston’s work. A conversation between Robert Storr and the artist Chuck Close, hosted by the Phillips Collection in 2011, yields further insights.

The American Academy in Rome launched its Rome Prize in Musical Composition in 1921, a time in the United States of rapidly changing ideas about national identity, musical values, and the significance of international artistic exchange. Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome tells the story of this prestigious fellowship. Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, the book offers new perspectives on a wide range of critical topics: patronage and urban culture, institutions and professional networks, musical aesthetics, American cultural diplomacy, and the maturation of a concert-music repertory in the United States during the twentieth century.

The Variae of Cassiodorus have long been valued as an epistolary collection offering a window into political and cultural life in a so-called barbarian successor state in sixth-century Italy. However, this study is the first to treat them as more than an assemblage of individual case studies and to analyze the collection’s wider historical context. M. Shane Bjornlie highlights the insights the Variae provide into early medieval political, ecclesiastical, fiscal and legal affairs and the influence of the political and military turbulence of Justinian’s reconquest of Italy and of political and cultural exchanges between Italy and Constantinople. The book also explores how Cassiodorus revised, updated, and assembled the Variae for publication and what this reveals about his motives for publishing an epistolary record and for his own political life at a crucial period of transformation for the Roman world.

In his introduction Bjornlie wrote, “The American Academy in Rome provided funding and incomparable hospitality during the last year in which I worked on the manuscript; the Arthur and Janet Ross Library at the Academy, and the many denizens of that library were particularly indispensable.”

Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

The book contains a preface by Michael C. J. Putnam, a 1964 Fellow and 1970 Resident.

This slender volume serves as both a guide to an event, our spring Open Studios, and a document of the artistic life at the American Academy in Rome during the 2007–8 Fellowship year.

This catalogue is a record of part of the work produced by the Fellows in the School of Fine Arts. Some of this work will be presented during the Open Studios at the end of May, on the occasion of the visit of our Board of Trustees. This volume serves as a guide for visitors to the Open Studios, and also as a record of that event for the future.

The Alchemy of Extremes publishes the proceedings of an international conference held in Rome in 2003 and promoted by the European Intellectual Lexicon of the National Research Council, in collaboration with the American Academy in Rome.

This publications is the annual record of work by Fellows and Residents at the American Academy in Rome during 2004–5.

This anthology of writing by men and women who have held literary fellowships at the American Academy in Rome over the last twenty-five years is of interest because of its subject. We see a variety of responses to a subject that proves as universally stimulating to writers as love, money, and death—Italy, and especially the Eternal City.

The publication of this book marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the American Academy in Rome and records its history since its founding in 1894 as a school of architecture. It has survived two depressions, two world wars, and various drastic uncertainties to emerge with a record in the creative arts comparable with that of the French Academy founded in Rome two centuries earlier.