Recently Published Reviews

Two recent books on visual culture and civil rights envision the pathway through race and nation as an endeavor privileging the visual and utilizing the corporeal. However, these books diverge at the point of “seeing,” with Maurice Berger investing in the expansive range of twentieth-century visual culture as it pertains to African Americans and Martin Berger zeroing in on what he calls “the complex social dynamics of the civil rights movement” (4). The latter, in other words, examines how images aided and abetted racial hegemony and comfort, racial expectation, and national investment. Both For All the World to See… Full Review

Siena has long been recognized as one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, and it is for this reason that in 1995 its entire historic center was added to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Between the advent of the commune in the twelfth century and the fall of the Guelph regime of the Nine Governors in 1355, the Sienese authorities erected architectural monuments of great significance, including the Palazzo Pubblico, new ramparts and gates, and several large-scale fountains, while the aristocratic and merchant elite constructed towers, tower-houses (casetorri), and… Full Review

No Impressionist was more innovative than Edgar Degas. Oblique glimpses of dancers in limelight, candid vignettes of brothel mores, and roughshod runs over respectable standards of finish still provide grist to students of Degas, whether in the library or studio. At the same time, the grounding of his art in expertise at drawing the nude sets him apart as the most traditional of the Impressionist group. Thus, his discomfort with being called an Impressionist, after Degas’s associates adopted the name derisively coined in Louis Leroy’s satirical review of the 1874 exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs… Full Review

The title Renaissance Theories of Vision immediately brings to mind a myriad of representational systems known collectively as perspective but more specifically labeled by type: atmospheric, single-point and multiple-point (also referred to as linear, scientific, and mathematical), intuitive, oblique, and reverse. Simultaneously, it conjures recollected textbook images of converging orthogonals superimposed on schematized masterworks like Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece (ca. 1438–40) and Pietro Perugino’s Sistine Chapel fresco Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter (1482). These fifteenth-century visions of carefully structured spaces inhabited by figures placed in calculated spatial and proportional relationship to one another as well as to… Full Review

Their story is legendary in Miami. Don and Mera Rubell began collecting art in 1967, when they lived in New York City. Their modest budget came from Mera’s salary as a Head Start teacher, and their acquisitions strategy consisted largely of purchasing work that excited their passions. The untimely passing of Don’s brother, Steve Rubell, in 1989, left them with a considerable inheritance with which to expand their collecting, and in 1996, they opened the Rubell Family Collection to the public in their adopted home, Miami. The Rubell Family Collection pioneered a new institutional model of private art collections… Full Review

At the close of The Clement Bible at the Medieval Courts of Naples and Avignon: A Study of Papal Power, Royal Prestige, and Patronage, Cathleen Fleck observes that the history of the Clement Bible can be understood in part through the pleasure and privilege of leafing through it, an experience that those who have sat turning its folios in the British Library, including the present reviewer, have shared with its earlier owners. Tracking the production and use of the codex through a series of inventories that reveal how highly valued ownership of the manuscript was, Fleck also makes a… Full Review

In his complex and disciplined book, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Iftikhar Dadi provides a genuinely antifoundationalist history of the modern art of Muslim South Asia. Instead of viewing that history through one or more existing analytical frames—namely Pakistani nationalism, Islamic or artistic cosmopolitanism, global modernism, or, most predictably, the tradition of South Asian Islamicate art—Dadi describes how artistic practice was driven by the inherent instability of each of those categories. The “crisis-ridden quest” for an “adequate discursive and aesthetic ground” for modern artistic practice led Muslim South Asian artists to experiment with a tradition that… Full Review

More than ten years ago now, Gloria Groom’s exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Those who saw it or perused the meticulously documented catalogue can attest to the sustained and probing nature of Nabi artists’ engagement with ostensibly private, intimate modes of decorative painting. Groom made this especially clear with a stunning installation of four panels from Édouard Vuillard’s Album (1895). Vuillard’s canvases quietly vibrate with areas of pattern denoting things such as blouses, flowers, wallpaper, and linens in a restricted palette of deep reds, muted… Full Review

In an article entitled “Les musées ne sont pas à vendre” (“Museums Are Not For Sale”) published on December 12, 2006, in the daily French paper Le Monde, the art historians Françoise Cachin, Jean Clair, and Roland Recht strongly denounced the increasing commercialization of the national patrimony, epitomized by the Louvre’s plan to rent out part of its collection to a branch established in Abu Dhabi. The authors warned the French administration against the incoherence of its cultural policy: claiming to protect the nation’s artistic treasures, while at the same time using those treasures as commodities. The… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 is an attempt to survey postmodernism as a design strategy rather than an epoch or paradigm of contemporary culture. Of course these elements prove difficult to separate, especially with regard to such a loaded term, employed by so many with intentions vast and diverse. The subtitle of the exhibition, Style and Subversion, is therefore important in its signal toward artistic innovation as a platform from which to think through poignant social and cultural transitions undertaken at the hands of architects, artists, and designers in a move away from… Full Review

As I entered the art galleries of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a boy, maybe eight years old, sat leaning into his father. They were watching, intently, Will Rogan's video One Thing I Can Tell You Is You've Got to Be Free (2000). A quirky, deadpan ode to the art spirit, the six-minute loop sets an unpretentious tone for the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection. In each of a series of eighteen vignettes, an object in motion—a bouncing ball, a paper airplane, a tossed shoe—flies into the frame toward an improbable target and makes a perfect landing. The… Full Review

Transition periods in art history rarely present straightforward theses, and eighteenth-century South Asia is no exception. In the recent past this period was characterized more eloquently in terms of its failure rather than its success, as a cultural gulf stretching between waning Mughal power and an encroaching British one. Art historians have viewed this political crisis of the Mughal state as a corollary of an artistic crisis of style and composition—a primary concern being the dissolution of a unifying stylistic and cultural vision, the hallmark of the early modern Mughal atelier. Yet, as this book argues, when viewed from the… Full Review

Lloyd Laing’s survey of art in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland from the Iron Age to the conversion period opens with an introductory chapter entitled "The Study of Celtic Art." It then provides an overview in the following chapter, "Pre-Christian Insular Celtic Art," exploring both the motifs and the media of metalwork and examining interactions with the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, ending with a consideration of the Mote of Mark as a site of cultural interaction. Chapter 3, "The Impact of Christianity," looks at the structure of the Celtic church, the role of monasticism, and the development of Insular Christian iconography… Full Review

The tronie—a head or character study—is not a portrait; tronies figure the anonymous as opposed to the recognized, the pathos of expression rather than the portrait’s posed veneer. The tronie and its precise relation to the academic genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life has been the subject of recent scholarly attention. The slippery pictorial genre first appeared in the sixteenth century as a workshop exercise designed to teach young apprentices the fundamentals of drawing and chiaroscuro. A tronie may also mimic a particular master’s style; thus it became a popular and marketable form in the seventeenth… Full Review

Adam Kern's Manga from the Floating World analyzes the literary genre of kibyōshi (literally, "yellow covers"), providing a particular focus on the subversive effects these small, fully illustrated works of humor had on the ruling military bureaucracy in late eighteenth-century Japan. The book is rich in detail and written in a style that is engaging, informative, and entertaining. Kern has a penchant for taking standard phrases and morphing them into something ironic, as in his title for chapter 4, "The Rise and Pratfall of the Kibyōshi." A further distinctive feature is that the study follows what is now standard… Full Review