Recently Published Reviews

For historians of photography, Josh Ellenbogen’s Reasoned and Unreasoned Images provides a significant theoretical discussion of photography’s aim to capture the visible and non-visible and, more widely, of its complex relation to human perception, cognition, and memory. The book undertakes close examination of the photographic oeuvres of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) as approached through the work of philosopher of science, physicist, and mathematician Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). Through this approach, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images becomes both a work of the philosophy of science and the history of photography. Indeed, this is its greatest strength… Full Review

Forty years ago, when I graduated from college, I applied for a year’s traveling fellowship to take me around the Mediterranean to study the reuse of ancient materials in medieval buildings. The committee rejected my application, telling me (off the record) that it was a “stupid” topic. Little did I know that a few years earlier, the German scholar Arnold Esch had begun a lifetime’s career publishing on that very subject (beginning with “Spolien. Zur Wiederverwendung antiker Baustücke und Skulpturen im mittelalterlichen Italien,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 51 (1969): 1–64), and forty years later “spoliology” has developed into a burgeoning… Full Review

The significance of Charles Palermo’s Fixed Ecstasy for scholarship on Joan Miró, and for modernist studies in general, is undiminished by the fact that after five years its only review appeared in France soon after the book’s publication. Palermo’s study not only breaks new ground by reevaluating Miró’s relationship to Surrealism, but also elucidates the stakes of the artist’s commitment to automatism. Encouraged to abandon a narrow view of automatism as a mere technique or as the suppression of conscious control, readers discover it to be a mode of experience that, when represented, evokes effects of continuity and separation between… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Machine Art exhibition of 1934 is one of those events that historians love, seemingly so rooted in its time and place that it all but becomes a metaphor, a defining moment of high modernism. Even the catalogue is iconic. With its cover photograph of a complex ball bearing system—all circles within circles—silhouetted against a black field, its lofty quotes from Plato and Aquinas, Josef Albers’s clean page layouts, and its crisp photographs of industrial equipment and household items, the publication exudes self-assurance and conjures a world of endless perfect forms in steel and glass… Full Review

Between about 1591 and 1592, Annibale Carracci, his older brother Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico decorated the main room of the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna with a cycle of frescoes depicting the life of the mythical founder of Rome, Romulus. Since their unveiling, the frescoes have been recognized as among the seminal achievements of the Carracci. The seventeenth-century art critic Giovan Pietro Bellori was particularly fulsome with his praise, writing that the cycle “renders the name of the Carracci glorious in all aspects of painting, and principally in coloring, for it is believed that none better was produced by their… Full Review

What does it mean to picture atrocity, to take photographs of death, destruction, and suffering, to hold those iconic images in our minds? Nearly forty years ago, Susan Sontag took up such questions in her essay “In Plato’s Cave” (in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), questions that would haunt her writing to the very end, be it in her last collection of meditations on the medium of photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), or in its addendum, the 2004 essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” published in the… Full Review

As a practice based in ideas, ephemeral actions, and linguistic provocations, Conceptual art has been made knowable through photography. Photography served to document pieces like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969), in which the artist released a succession of gaseous substances into the atmosphere; the medium also informed the very structure of projects such as Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), in which Piper took a picture in the mirror every day to assure herself of her existence during a summer of fasting and reading only Kant, yielding a serial representation of her changing body. If Conceptual art is… Full Review

Consult the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), and you will not find an entry on English record and survey photography, nor is the subject mentioned in the lengthy article on “survey photography.” But there is a biographical entry on Sir John Benjamin Stone, and it includes a curious editorial comment: “That Stone is not more celebrated should be a national shame, for he presented England with its history” (1351). Stone (1838–1914) was the founder of the National Photographic Record Association, one of dozens of British turn-of-the-century survey initiatives that… Full Review

Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review

For two books on American photography and fiction, Marcy J. Dinius’s The Camera and the Press and Stuart Burrows’s A Familiar Strangeness could not be more different. The approach of The Camera and the Press is historical, with a concentration on the medium of daguerreotypy. Dinius draws on a rich variety of archival sources, including daguerreotype images, advertisements, and periodical literature, to illuminate the ways that the production, reception, and materiality of daguerreotypes affected their cultural significance. By contrast, A Familiar Strangeness considers photography generally as an expression of modernity—as a form of mass reproduction. Rather than examining a specific… Full Review

Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning's life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial… Full Review

In James Cahill’s own words, the goal of Pictures for Use and Pleasure is to facilitate “further, deeper, and altogether better studies” of the proposed category of vernacular paintings (199). The interest is in finding, sorting, and identifying such paintings according to their subject areas; in making (corrective) attributions with suggested dates, artists’ names, and styles; and in offering interpretations with respect to function, aesthetic concern, and regional variation. The paintings studied were kept mostly in the private quarters of elite households, the inner and secondary palace complexes, and in urban places of pleasure frequented by male elite. Their artists… Full Review

The field of Roman cartography has undergone a renaissance in recent years. This is due not only to the publication of books like The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Richard J. A. Talbert, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), but also to a fundamental shift in how scholars understand the function of Roman maps. For decades, scholars assumed that the Romans used maps much like we do, as navigational aids to facilitate travel and warfare. This assumption, however, has proven to be both anachronistic and inaccurate. Unlike modern people, the Romans rarely used maps for navigation, instead… Full Review

Haim Steinbach’s latest artists’ book incorporates several of his sculptural themes into the codex form, exploring the choice and display of mass-market products and creating a dialectic between photobook and sculptural book. Object is a board book comprised of sixty-one color photographs featuring Steinbach’s signature found objects, mostly shot one per page, head-on, and silhouetted against a white background. Approximately the size and thickness of a stack of LP record albums, the book is made fully sculptural with rounded fore-edges and, most dramatically, a hole die-cut through the whole thing. This tension between book and sculpture constitutes the (empty) core… Full Review

This collection of essays (eleven in English, three in French) contributed by fourteen scholars of art history and Christian liturgy from eight countries is focused on the development of altarpieces/retables in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as explored at a 2006 symposium in Gröningen, Germany. Findings are derived from physical remains and records of creation and use, and reveal affinities and diversities across scattered European sites, while providing bases for further study of a previously under-explored but prominent type of late medieval decoration. In their introduction, editors Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt emphasize the importance… Full Review