Alessandra Comini
University Distinguished Professor of Art History

I believe in, and hence teach, the cultural content of artistic form. Why did Ibsen say, for example, "To understand my plays one must know Norway"?

How do Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Martha Graham project the ideas of agony and ecstasy in modern dance? How and why do abstract or minimalist artists communicate the very same feelings, explore the psyche, probe and reveal new realms? How are we manipulated by architecture, by color, by sound, by sound bytes? All of these questions form part of the terrain over which the magic carpet of art history flies; the answers are our own personal discoveries, forged in a common quest, and shaped for a lifetime.

To those practical doubters (parents?) who wonder "why art history?" we can give Mondrian's explanation: "Art does not create objects for practical use; art provides images for spiritual needs." Art history teaches us about ourselves, our past and our present, and gives us, I believe, the sustaining wherewithal to address our future.

A Brief Vita
Alessandra Comini received her B. A. degree from Barnard College, her M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph. D. "with distinction" from Columbia University where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University, and been named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University's European Humanities Research Centre (1996). Voted "outstanding professor" by her students twelve times, she has been extended the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts and the United Methodist Church Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (1996).

An undergraduate and a graduate scholarship in her name have been established by former students—one a professor of surgical oncology in Little Rock, Arkansas; the other, a co-owner of an international antiques business in Dallas.

Professional Pursuits
My personal teaching and publishing interests are threefold: "traditional" art history (monographic studies of various artists); "revisionist" art history (neglected geographical areas such as Scandinavia; women artists past and present; modern myth-making and the manipulation of imagery), and what I delight in calling "musical iconography" (tracing the mythopoesis of composers).

Other Interests
A featured speaker at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Symposia under conductor Kurt Masur, Professor Comini, who is also an amateur flutist, has participated in many congresses and symposia from Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Dublin, and Oxford to Montpellier, Hamburg, Graz, Vienna, Budapest, and St. Petersburg in her special field of musical iconography.
In recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor in l990 by the Republic of Austria. Her lively revisionist work in the history of women artists was acknowledged in 1995 by the Women's Caucus for Art with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Publications
Professor Comini has published seven books, of which one, Egon Schiele's Portraits (l974, reissued in paperback, l990), was nominated for the National Book Award and received the College Art Association's Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her other books are: Schiele in Prison (l973), Gustav Klimt (l975, with French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued 2001), Egon Schiele (l976, with Italian, French, German, and Dutch editions; reissued 2001), The Fantastic Art of Vienna (l978), The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (l987), and Egon Schiele Nudes (1994).

She contributed the chapter on Scandinavian artists to the l990 book World Impressionism, essays for the Washington National Gallery's l992 catalogue and exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz (German edition, 1993) and 1994 catalogue and traveling exhibition of Egon Schiele, as well as an eponymous essay for the 1994 book La Traviata, Violetta and Her Sisters and one for the 1996 English National Opera booklet, Salome.

A major essay on the visual Wagner appears in the 1997 book The Threat to the Cosmos, two on Mahler in Muziek & Wetenschap (1996) and in Gustav Mahler et l'ironie (2001) and one on Beethoven in Beethoven and His World (2000) as well as one on allegory in Klimt und die Frauen (2000). The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society commissioned a lecture "Toys in Freud's Attic" for 2000 and the Santa Fe Opera annually commissioned special lectures from her from 1997 to 2002.

acomini@smu.edu
214.768.2488