Chu, Petra Ten-Doesschate 1942-

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CHU, Petra ten-Doesschate 1942-

PERSONAL: Born October 15, 1942, in Greenville, SC; daughter of Jurriaan (an ophthalmologist) and Lidy (a pediatrician; maiden name, Ameling) ten-Doesschate; married Fen-Dow Chu (a naval architect), 1971; children: May-Ying, Lidy, Hsiao-Yun, Wei. Education: Sorbonne, University of Paris, Diplome Superieur Cours de Civilization Francaise, 1961; University of Utrecht, Doctoraal, 1967; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1972.

ADDRESSES: Home—22 Park Pl., South Orange, NJ 07079. Offıce—Department of Art and Music, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 07079. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Educator, writer, and editor. Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, assistant professor, 1972-77, associate professor, 1977-80, chairperson of department of art and music, 1977-98; professor of art, 1980—. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, visiting professor, 1990-92. Series editor, with Jacques de Caso, of "Princeton Series in Nineteenth-Century Art, Culture, and Society," 1991-97; managing editor of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 1999—.

MEMBER: College Art Association of America, Society for French Nineteenth-Century Studies, Historians of Netherlandish Art, Dutch Society of Art History, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (president, 1999—).

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellow, 1986-87, 1991; grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986-88, 1994; Wheatland Foundation, research grant, 1990; Jane and Morgan Whitney Art History fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994-95; Humanities Research Centre award, Australian National University, 2003; Netherlands Institute of Advanced Research grant, 2004.

WRITINGS:

French Realism and the Dutch Masters, Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert (Utrecht, Netherlands), 1974.

Courbet in Perspective, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1977.

Dominique Vivant Denon (Volume 121 of The Illustrated Bartsch), Abaris (New York, NY), part one, 1985, part two, 1988.

(Editor and translator) The Letters of Gustave Courbet, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

(Contributor and coeditor, with Gabriel Weisberg) ThePopularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1994.

(Contributor) Redefining Genre: French and AmericanPainting, 1850-1900, Trust for Museum Exhibitions (Washington, DC), 1995.

(With Joerg Zutter) Courbet: Artiste et promoteur de son oeuvre (exhibition catalogue), Flammarion (Paris, France), 1998.

Nineteenth-Century European Art, H. Abrams (New York, NY), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including The European Realist Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gabriel Weisberg, Indiana University Press, 1982; The Documented Image: Festschrift for Elizabeth Holt, Syracuse University Press, 1987; and The Macmillan Dictionary of Art. Contributor of essays to art exhibition catalogues, including Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist, Im Lichte Hollands: Hollaendische Malerie des 17. Jahrhunderts aus dem Sammlungen des Fuersten von Liechtenstein und aus Schweizer Besitz, Kunstmuseum (Basel, Switzerland), 1987, and Art of the July Monarchy. Contributor to art journals, including Arts Magazine and Apollo.

SIDELIGHTS: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is a professor of art at Seton Hall University and author and editor of numerous articles and several books on nineteenth-century art, focusing largely on the French and European tradition. Working as both translator and editor, Chu collected more than 600 of the letters of the French impressionist painter Gustave Courbet in the Letters of Gustave Courbet. This correspondence chronicles Courbet's life from the time of his spoiled teenage years through his entry into the art world, his growing disgust with imperialism, his part in the Paris Commune, and finally his exile in Switzerland, where he died. In correspondence with writers and artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Claude Monet, and Victor Hugo, these letters confirm, according to Journal of European Studies reviewer Robert Lethbridge, "that behind the peasant buffoon there lay a deeply serious artist." Lethbridge further noted that "this volume will become the standard work of reference," and that it is "the measure of Professor Chu's achievement" that she was able to impose chronology on the correspondence despite the fact that Courbet famously neglected to date his letters. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jack Flam felt that the "chronicle of Courbet's embattled career is vividly evoked" in Chu's work. Flam added that Chu did an "exemplary job of editing, annotating and translating."

Working with Gabriel Weisberg, Chu also edited the 1994 study The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy. A collection of nine essays, including one from Chu, this collection provides a "new and noteworthy attempt to sidestep the shoals of both modernism and revisionism by looking at the art of the period from the point of view of popular culture," according to Patricia Mainardi, writing in the Journal of Modern History. The July Monarchy in France lasted from 1831 to 1848 and is one of the least studied periods of French art, usually regarded, as Mainardi further explained, as "a kind of art historical stepchild." Coming at the end of Classicism and Romanticism, and before the advent of Realism, the period is marked by the increase in landscape art and by the utilization of new techniques of visual representation, such as the lithograph; it thus helped to break down the strict bounds between high and low art. Chu's contribution to the collection, "Pop Culture in the Making: The Romantic Craze for History," articulates, according to Mainardi, "some of the most salient aspects" of the book's argument for a revised view of that epoch and its art. Similarly, Lethbridge, writing in the Journal of European Studies, felt that the "most far-reaching" essay in the volume is Chu's, "which is a supplementary overview beyond the editorial formalities of her Introduction." In a review forHistory, Pamela Pilbeam called Chu's contribution a "wide-ranging chapter on the 'pop' craze for history." Lethbridge added, "This collection offers specialists of the July Monarchy intersecting scholarship at its best." Mainardi went on to note that the book "will provide enough fertile material for future investigations" and will also supply "valuable reading for a wide audience." And Pilbeam also had praise for the volume as a whole, noting that it was "handsomely produced" and that it "merits, and should attract, a wide readership."

In 2002 Chu published her overview of European art, Nineteenth-Century European Art, a book that "superbly conveys the interconnectedness of art, history, culture, society, and politics," according to Edward K. Owusu-Ansah, writing in Library Journal. Chu approaches her subject chronologically, in a series of twenty chapters with more than 500 illustrations, documenting the work of painters from Francisco Goya to John Ruskin. Owusu-Ansah further praised the book as both "eloquently written" and "deeply engaging," additionally calling it the "best single-volume" approach to the subject.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English Historical Review, February, 1997, Linda Whiteley, review of The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, pp. 229-230.

History, July, 1996, Pamela Pilbeam, review of ThePopularization of Images, pp. 480-481.

Journal of European Studies, March, 1994, Robert Lethbridge, review of Letters of Gustave Courbet, pp. 65-66; September, 1997, Robert Lethbridge, review of The Popularization of Images, pp. 378-379.

Journal of Modern History, September, 1997, Patricia Mainardi, review of The Popularization of Images, pp. 605-608.

Library Journal, February 15, 2003, Edward K. Owusu-Ansah, review of Nineteenth-Century European Art, pp. 131-132.

Publishers weekly, January 27, 1992, review of Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 82.

Wall Street Journal, May 29, 1992, Jack Flam, review of Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. A9.