On the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday on April 21, 2016, Kay Fortson Chair in European Art and Professor of Art History Jeffrey Chipps Smith was honored with a Festschrift from his former students and colleagues. A vehicle for recognizing the work over a career of scholarship, the Festschrift often includes a publication of a book of essays as tribute. The very first Festschrift appeared in 1640, published in Leipzig by Gregor Ritzsch. Begun in 2016, the Festschrift dedicated to Smith, edited by Smith's former graduate students, has been released through Brepols Publishers. Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith brings together new scholarship on European art from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries by a range of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Baldung Grien, Sebald Beham, Gerard David, and Rembrandt van Rijn.
Smith began teaching at The University of Texas at Austin in 1979 and was made full professor in 1992. He has received numerous grants and awards from such organizations as the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Samuel H. Kress Foudation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; in spring 2010 he was resident at the American Academy in Berlin as a recipient of the Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize.
“The joint ideas of imagery and ingenuity represent the variety of topics and questions explored by Jeffrey Chipps Smith throughout his career,” wrote the publication editors and Smith’s former graduate students Catharine Ingersoll, Alisa McCusker and Jessica Weiss. Currently, Ingersoll serves as assistant professor of art history at Virginia Military Institute, Weiss is an assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and McCusker is associate curator of European and American Art at the Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Missouri. Each of them earned their PhDs at The University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Smith.
“Jeff’s approach to advising his graduate students tends toward the pragmatic,” recalls Ingersoll in the publication’s introduction. She continued,
I recall spending most of the semester on a seminar paper that just was not going anywhere – I could not determine answers to any of the research questions I was interested in pursuing – and, worried for my grade, I finally consulted Jeff about my difficulties. He was nonplussed and reassuring, saying “well now you know how to identify a project that isn’t going to work out for you! And knowing this will save you time in the future”.
Many contributors to this volume have also been Smith’s students, including Miriam L. Kirch, Annette LeZotte, Sally Whitman Coleman, and Anne Proctor. The essays are organized around concepts prevalent in Smith’s writing over the years. The first section, ‘Multivalence in Religious Themes’, considers the wide variety of messages, both sacred and secular, found in religious artwork of early modern northern Europe. In ‘Artists and Their Practices’, the authors explore questions related to German and Netherlandish artistic identity and how this is expressed in artists’ training, output, and social and professional connections. ‘Patronage and Display’ contains essays about the commission, presentation, and reception of artworks. The final section of this volume, ‘Places, Spaces, and Traditions’, takes on the importance of location and localized history in the production, discussion, and installation of artwork both north and south of the Alps. The essays presented constitute a diverse investigation into the many ingenious means and methods of developing and utilizing visual imagery in early modern Europe.
Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith is now available through Brepols Publishers.