The Mario Del Chiaro Fund for the Study of Etruscan Art has been established, by means of a gift of $50,000 from the celebrated Etruscologist Mario A. Del Chiaro, Berkeley alumnus, and Professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara. It is intended to support teaching and research on Etruscan art at Berkeley, with the long-term goal of having the subject become part of our regular curriculum. With a generous gift of $50,000, Professor Mario A. Del Chiaro, an alumnus of our department and Professor Emeritus of the History of Art Department at UC Santa Barbara, has set up a fund to support the study and teaching of Etruscan and other ancient Italian art at Berkeley. Professor Del Chiaro graduated from UC Berkeley in the 1950s, earning his BA and MA, and finally his PhD in 1956— only the second PhD that the (then new) Berkeley department ever awarded. After leaving Berkeley, Mario was one of the founding members of the Art History Department at UC Santa Barbara, where he taught for nearly forty years, retiring in 1994. A specialist in Etruscan art, Professor Del Chiaro spent many years engaged in research at Cerveteri (ancient Caere) and a dozen excavations throughout the Mediterranean. As a result of his important contributions to the study of Etruscan art and archaeology, in 1992 professor Del Chiaro received the Order of Merit, Cavaliere Ufficiale, from the Republic of Italy. His publications include Etruscan Red-Figure Vase-Painting (1974) and more than 100 scholarly articles. The fund is intended to support the study of Etruscan art in various ways: lectures on Etruscan Art by distinguished visitors; support for courses in Etruscan art; and travel funds for students to visit archaeological sites or participate in archaeological excavations.

(above) Mario del Chiaro, together with Chris Hallett and Lisa Pieraccini. Pieraccini was Del Chiaro’s last PhD student and currently teaches Etruscan art at U.C. Berkeley.

The Guitty Azarpay Endowment in the History of the Arts of Iran and Central Asia has been received jointly by the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies Departments. It is an endowment of just over $2 million, given in honor of eminent Berkeley Professor emerita, Guitty Azarpay, the income from which will support a distinguished visitor each year, who will be part of both departments, and give lectures on the Art of Iran and Central Asia. This year the History of Art department was the joint recipient, together with the department of Near Eastern Studies (NES), of a gift of just over $2 million dollars. This endowment is named for the eminent scholar of Silk Road Art and Archaeology, Professor Guitty Azarpay, emerita member of the faculty of the NES department. It is intended to support a Visiting Professor to come and teach courses in the History of Art of Iran and Central Asia. We hope that the first visitor in this Program will be brought to the campus in 2012-2013. If, at some future date, the University is able to create a faculty position in the History of the Arts of Iran and Central Asia, the endowment will be redirected to create an Endowed Chair in support of that position.

(above) Guitty Azarpay (below) Bronze spoon from the Tomb of the Boncia, Chiusi, Italy, ca. 480 BC.

Thanks to funds provided by the widow of the extraordinary Jean Bony, who held a Chair in Medieval Art in our department from 1962-1980, our seminar room, 308B Doe Library, was renovated and renamed in his honor in 2008. The extensive improvements included installation of a dedicated digital projector complete with a 'smart panel' (including DVD player and easy hook-ups for laptop computers); a fully integrated sound system; and a motorized projection screen. The department is delighted with its new seminar room, and grateful for the generous gift.

The department’s newly-renovated Jean Bony Seminar Room (308B Doe Library). Photo, right: Mont Allen.

The Mary C. Stoddard Lectures in the History of Art are made possible by an endowment given by Mary Stoddard. She had a lifelong passion for the visual arts—particularly for Islamic art and the decorative arts—and she was an active volunteer at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for many years. Since its inception, the Department has used income from the Stoddard Endowment to enhance the program in a number of different ways. The Endowment has so far underwritten lectures by five distinguished scholars: the inaugural lecture, given by W.J.T. Mitchell in 2004; Alex Potts’ three-part lecture series and seminar in 2005; Raya Shani’s lecture in 2007; Gülru Necipoglu's lecture in 2010; and a lecture by Osmund Bopearachchi in 2011 . In addition, the Stoddard Endowment provided vital funding for two undergraduate courses in Islamic art, which Raya Shani taught in the department in Spring 2007.

• 2004 W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago): “Abstraction and Intimacy.”
• 2005 Alex Potts (University of Michigan): three-part lecture series on “Commitment and the Substance of Things,” “The New Realism,” and “Actions,” with a follow-up seminar.
• 2007 Raya Shani (Hebrew University): “Muhammad’s Ascent to Heaven in Persian Painting: Muslim Iconography in Transition.”
• 2010 Stoddard Lecture was delivered by Gülru Necipoglu. The lecture was entitled "The Aesthetics of Ornament in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman and Safavid Courts".
• 2011 Stoddard Lecture was delivered by Osmund Bopearachchi. The lecture was entitled "The Kushans and the Earliest Depictions of Brahmanical Divinities in Gandhãra".
• Announcing our Stoddard Lecture Fall 2012: Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will speak on American historical textiles.

A BIT OF THE LIFE OF
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE MARY C. STODDARD LECTURES

by her daughter Susanna Hopgood

Mary C. Stoddard pursued parallel careers, one as designer, builder and manager of residential properties and the other as art historian, specializing in the decorative arts and in textile conservation. In the realm of architecture, Mary restored and preserved landmark homes in Berkeley and Belvedere. She gave property developed in Tiburon to the University of California to establish the Mary C. Stoddard Lecture Fund for the History of Art Department. The purpose of the fund is to endow a distinguished visiting professor and public lecturer of Mary's fields of interest, the Islamic Arts, the Decorative Arts, and the History of Textiles.

Mary's undergraduate studies were conducted at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, where she received a B.A. in Art History. Over the years she made numerous study trips to pursue her various interests in art, architecture, and archaeology, including the study of Etruscan pottery in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa; the study of fabrics in Mexico; the study of Inuit carving in Alaska; and the study of carpets and textiles in Russia, Korea, China, and Japan. She had a great interest in European and American printed textiles, quilts, Indian and European shawls and embroidery, and weaving.

In addition, Mary collected specimens and compiled information for a horticultural directory of California native plants during the ten years she volunteered at the Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. At Grace Cathedral in San Francisco she helped direct and mount two exhibits of modern and sacred art. At the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology she was co-curator of an exhibit of Kashmir shawls and also curated an exhibit, "I Came, I Saw, I Bought: Piranesi and the Tourist Art of Rome," displaying a combination of items that travelers brought back from Rome in the 18th-20th centuries. Mary volunteered in the textile departments at the M.H. de Young Museum and the Phoebe Hearst Museum as well as in the library and photo/slide departments of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

The celebrated Berkeley baker shows his art-historical colors by Stephanie Pearson A strong interest in art history is among the less recognized of Steve Sullivan's qualities. Gastronomes across the country — especially proud Berkeleyans — know him better as the founder and owner of the Acme Bread Company, whose crusty loaves and flaky pastries inspire swoons in both the flagship bakery (on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley) and local restaurants. Yet Mr. Sullivan's longtime relationship with bread and Berkeley can be seen as perfectly conjoined with his passion for art history: all stem from Mr. Sullivan's intellectual voracity and its (partial) satisfaction in worldly travels. In the 1970s, while pursuing a BA in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Mr. Sullivan took a summer trip through Europe that prompted both his breadbaking career and a lifetime of traveling and learning. Back in Berkeley, after having established Acme Bread and grown it into the famed fixture it is now, Mr. Sullivan returned to UC Berkeley for a BA in History. Today he continues his energetic leadership of Acme as well as his education, devotedly auditing courses in History of Art, Classics, and History. In History of Art alone, he has audited courses on Byzantine Art, Etruscan Art, Renaissance Florence, Renaissance Rome and the Southern Baroque. A recent interview over coffee illuminates some of the art-historical interests of this local pioneer and valued Friend of the History of Art Department.
You once mentioned that you had an interest in Byzantine art history; was that a focus of yours when you were an undergraduate at Berkeley? My whole "coming back to school" thing was motivated by traveling as an adult, and realizing how much more fruitful it would be to know about the places I was going and the things I was seeing. If you go to Ravenna, you can't help but wonder what the heck is going on with this Byzantine stuff! It really came out of the traveling, seeing incredible things… It was an interest in the material world that fed backwards into an interest in the history and culture. What did you focus on for your Bachelor's in history? I avoided an emphasis. Now you have to have an emphasis, but when I was in school I had a choice to not have one; so actually in History, I was as broad as possible: I did a fair amount of US history, and European history, ancient and into the Renaissance, and did my undergraduate thesis in American history, using daily newspapers. The other thing I did when I came back to school [to finish the BA] was seek out professors who would really be great to listen to, study for — thinking of each class as an apprenticeship, where you have the opportunity to work your butt off and learn as much as you can from somebody who has spent a lifetime studying something that is interesting. Almost anything is interesting when you start to learn about it. In fact, I remember when I took my first art history class, from Andy Stewart, Art History 10 (the survey in Ancient Art), he was teaching his upper-division lecture course on Archaic Greek Art the next semester. I asked him what he would mostly focus on [in that class], since I might not be interested if it would mostly be a lot of pots. He just said "It's gonna be great," and so I took it — and it was a lot of pots, and of course it was incredibly fascinating! Things you might not know in advance are going to turn out to be fascinating if you're working with someone who is a master of that area. What classes did you take in art history as an undergraduate? Two or three of Stewart's ancient series; two of Partridge's city classes, and his Renaissance survey; and the first time Tim Clark did his course on Cezanne and art history. Keeping to your deliberate avoidance of specialization! Yes, just finding people who were really great to listen to and write for. What sort of art do you have in your house? [Laughs] Inexpensive art! Generally it's representational as opposed to abstract. The way our house is made involved the wall spaces being very small, so it's mostly tiny paintings. … it's accessible, usable in the house, and mostly paintings. We have a bronze sculpture that our insurance agent gave us, actually! — he's Greek. It's a flat-cast bronze, an Artemis shooting an arrow, in the forms you'd see on an Archaic pot, but in bronze. It's funny, because I had just taken Archaic Greek Art when he brought this back for us. You do some handiwork yourself, including orchestrating some stunning monuments at the Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco in 2008 — could you say a word about that? These people who do big bread sculptures who teach at the San Francisco Baking Institute came, and they had this proposal to make a huge Slow Food snail out of bread. They made this iron armature with diverse beautiful loaves, and they impaled them on these spikes that stuck out from the armature; that was the centerpiece for this museum that we set up of American bread baking. The idea was to have bread from bakeries all over the country now, kind of modeled on a 19th-century natural history museum — where you've got all these specimens, like at Paris in the old natural history museum, with specimens just on big tables. It didn't turn out that way; it turned out to be a little bit more lively! So we were calling it the Great Hall of Bread. We solicited bread and photograph submissions from bakeries all over the country to make a snapshot of the success story that the reinvigoration of artisanal bread-baking in American has been over the past 20-25 years. We had big photomontages and bread displays from about 50 bakeries all over the country. That was in the center of this museum. It was set up — well, not exactly like a Greek temple, but sort of! — it had the inner room with a peripteral promenade and walls around the exterior hung with reproductions of certain historical breadbaking traditions in photomontages and cultural variants. There was a set of photographs from the Lubavitch Matzah Bakery in Brooklyn, with step-by-step photography of what they do in 18 minutes to create this matzah by hand. There were photographs of Sardinian peasant ladies making tradition Sardinian bread in a big wood-burning oven. There were old archival photographs of American bakeries from the 1870s to the 1930s. We had two great reproductions, one of a Chardin and one of a Cezanne, that had bread displayed in them, and we had local bakers make bread in the form of the bread in the photographs to be displayed in these baskets on pedestals down below. The whole [museum] was ringed with planters we made out of pallettes we used to grow wheat grass, so the whole this was surrounded by this four-foot-tall wheat grass. Amazing — what a production! [Laughs] It was the biggest mistake of my life! No, it was so much work — growing all this wheat in boxes on the roof. It was monumental.
I love Chardin too, so I have to ask this hokey question relating to the painting you mentioned: do you find yourself, as a breadmaker, looking at bread in paintings? Yes, although bread in general is not all that photogenic in some ways. But there is that early Cezanne that has a long slender split loaf of bread in it, and the Chardin's got these brioches — it's not really bread bread, but it's these toppling brioches that grew unevenly in the oven. You give the technical eye to it, then! Well, you know in a wood-burning oven the fire's on one side, so you get an idea that that's part of the reason for that [in the Chardin]. Do you think that there is substance to the expression "the art of baking"? I used to say no. I used to say that really, it's a craft. But anything can be an art, I guess. The way I define art is, when anything in front of you is intended to stand for something else or represent something that can't be represented. Anything can be an art if you go about it with that intention. I don't profess to be an artist — in fact, I profess not to be an artist! But I think it [breadmaking] can be. What was your favorite decorative loaf you ever made? When Alice's [Waters, of Chez Panisse] father died … he had been around a fair amount … he lived to be very old, very active, and had always been interested in the restaurant, and peripherally in our bakery. He always wore a cardigan sweater. He died in the holiday season about three years ago. I had gotten in the habit of making these decorative breads that I brought to Chez Panisse for New Year's Eve holiday. I wanted to do something that commemorated Pat Waters' life, that wasn't too abstract. So I got this notion to try to represent a cardigan sweater, as if someone were wearing it but without a person. I figured out a way to do it so it actually looked pretty good. I almost gave up, thinking "how am I gonna fold that?," but I realized that I could make it in layers. It was in what you'd call "low relief" [chuckles]. That was the one that I liked most.	At the reception afterwards the author signed advance copies of his book and donated the proceeds to the Walter Horn Fund. In the photograph (left to right): local baker Steve Sullivan, Professor Andrew Stewart, art dealer Bob Green, and artist Mark Erikson. [Photo: Erin Babnik]

Much of this year was devoted to political activism on behalf of public education in California, once the top-ranking state school system in the country, now near the bottom in terms of funding per student. (Greg Levine was the hardest worker of all.) As a product of this state's public schools, I am exasperated to witness the undermining of a system which once worked so very well. The only good to come of our crisis has been to witness the remarkable energy of our graduate students in support of our beleaguered University and History of Art department. They have been amazing, coming together as a community at precisely the moment they could have withdrawn into isolation and resentment. Instead, besides joining marches and meetings, they have volunteered to organize fund-raising events, redesign our website, contribute to the newsletter, and initiate the use of facebook and twitter on our behalf. Here I wish to convey how much I admire them and how very impressive they have been. When we were forced to give them less, they gave us more. On behalf of the entire faculty, let me thank our graduate students for their work, including their selfless service organizing our special events. Many graduate students have helped at each, handing out programs, pouring wine etc., but special thanks go to: Mont Allen for organizing receptions; Erin Babnik for taking gorgeous photographs; Yasmine Van Pee, Diana Greenwold, and Alexandra Courtois for so successfully organizing our first fundraiser, the Walter Horn event; Elaine Yau and Cristin McKnight Sethi for assisting at the event itself; Matthew Culler, Alexandra Courtois, Kailani Polzak, Micki McCoy, Samantha Henneberry, Lizzy Ramhorst, Diana Greenwold, Cristin McKnight Sethi, William Ma, Laura Richard Janku and Camille Mathieu (as former organizer and adviser) for making the Graduate Symposium such a success; Stephanie Pearson for interviewing Friend of the Department, Steve Sullivan, and taking charge of the redesigning of our webpage; Vanessa Lyon for sharing her fundraising experience; Will Coleman for initiating fundraising, including our Object talks at the Berkeley Art Museum; Jessica Stewart for spearheading the Development Committee program of museum outreach; Micki McCoy for serving as graduate student delegate to the Graduate Assembly; Micki McCoy and Lizzy Ramhorst for giving our first Object talks at BAM; and Sarah Dennis, my Research Assistant, for helping me in numerous ways, including contacting graduate students and alumni. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Editor, Annual Newsletter.

Graduate students Camille Mathieu, Elaine Yau, Will Coleman, Kailani Polzak, and Sarah Dennis at the Sacramento Capitol on March 4, 2010. Some of us were seen in the New York Times carrying banners made by Darcy. [Photo: Alexandra Courtois].