Art History

Standing before a class one recent Tuesday afternoon, an instructor held up Jackson Pollock's 1943 Mural, a canvas splattered with paint of every conceivable hue. "How does this make you feel?" she asked. "Like this!" said one student who jumped up suddenly, waving his arms as though he planned to take flight. The first graders at St. Joan of Arc Elementary School were fixed on volunteer Ann Bloss, 43, mother of three boys at the school, and a print of the abstract expressionist's work.

Rosemont College announced this week that president Ann M. Amore had taken a medical leave of absence for an indefinite period, and will be replaced by acting president Sharon Latchaw Hirsh, a professor of art history at Dickinson College. Citing privacy law, Rosemont spokeswoman Christyn Moran Newman declined to say what was ailing Amore, or how long she expects to be gone. Hirsh's appointment is for six months, Moran Newman said. In a letter this week to students and professors, however, Amore did not sound like an administrator who would be returning anytime soon to the small Catholic liberal arts school on the Main Line.

Kathleen Compton Sherrerd, 72, of Bryn Mawr, a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, died Thursday at her home. Mrs. Sherrerd devoted most of her long career as a civic volunteer to the museum. She had been a trustee since 1988 and served on the board's executive, development and finance committees as well as the committee on prints, drawings and photographs. Last year she cochaired the museum's successful capital campaign. Her involvement with the museum began in 1965 when she became a volunteer guide and completed an intensive course on the museum's collection.

Reacting to a spike in reports of stolen art and cultural artifacts, the FBI has assembled a new team of agents to specialize in tracking down art thieves. First stop: Philadelphia. Taking advantage of the expertise of a local FBI agent and local institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the team is holding its first group training session here this week. Classes were held for the agents at the Penn museum yesterday and at the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier in the week.

Artist Jacob Landau was commissioned more than 30 years ago to create a series of dramatic stained-glass windows for the sanctuary of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park. Using a palette of primary colors and a blend of traditional and modern imagery, Landau designed 10 tall windows to tell the story of the Hebrew biblical prophets. The series was called "The Prophetic Quest. " It is featured through Jan. 30 at Keneseth Israel in an exhibition called "The Hebrew Bible in American Stained Glass.

George Cameron Vail is a whirlwind in disguise. You might not know that he exists but for the persistent, colorful stories spun by those who have worked with him - successful artists, a big-name Camden County prosecutor, and the former editor of a once thriving chain of South Jersey weeklies. We found him, this retired art professor, at his home in Audubon, where he still makes a daily trek to the carriage-house studio in his backyard to paint landscapes and portraits, to carve guitars and dulcimers from tiger maple and mahogany, and to restore antique art. "I don't usually do interviews," said Vail, 82, a twinkle in his eyes.

Periodically, art-history students at the University of Pennsylvania practice being museum curators by organizing an exhibition under faculty supervision. This year, 12 students selected a show of 51 drawings and watercolors lent by the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. The works chosen are mostly English and French, with emphasis on academic technique, typified by John Ruskin's head of a lion and Adolphe-William Bouguereau's portrait of a peasant girl. Although it includes drawings by Degas, Ingres and Pissarro, this isn't a dream show of 19th-century drawing.

In the Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders version of Dante's Inferno, there's room in hell for world leaders such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, as well as boldface names like Wilt Chamberlain and Anna Nicole Smith. There is no place, however, for footnotes. "With a real version of The Inferno," says Birk, referring to the first part of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's 700-year-old allegorical masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, "after you finish each chapter, you have to flip through so many footnotes to find out who all these historical figures he mentions are. Everybody's the son of somebody, from the kingdom of something.

Intrigued by the expressive way artists have portrayed beautiful women and by the talented geisha entertainers in colorful Japanese woodblock prints, Ginger da Costa decided to try her hand at the ancient art form. An art history professor, da Costa drew on her love of vintage photographs, Asian culture and the classical world to create images of the geisha, dancing and playing the traditional musical instruments, as well as of the goddess Aphrodite, heeding Cupid's advice. Da Costa's work, along with the prints created by her West Chester University colleague Belle Hollon, will be exhibited in a two-person show, Beyond Ukiyo-e: Creative Woodblock Prints, at the Chester County Art Association through Dec. 20. "It was 15 years since I made art," confessed da Costa, who has a doctorate in art history.

New Jersey's arts community gathered here yesterday and pushed the notion that when your head is about to get lopped off, squawking loudly and frequently could be a lifesaver. Since Gov. McGreevey proposed widespread budget cuts to close a $5 billion gap between income and spending, the representatives of arts, history and culture have been perhaps the fiercest defenders of their collective turf. They have lobbied, spoken to theater and concert crowds, and posed the large question of whether subtracting arts from society was good public policy.