Recently Published Reviews

Sir Philip Sassoon organized the first exhibition of the English conversation piece in 1930. Describing this type of painting as “a representation of two or more persons in a state of dramatic or psychological relation to each other,” Sassoon displayed over 150 eighteenth-century pictures in his own house. Following Sassoon’s identification of the genre, books and exhibitions about the conversation piece appeared steadily between the 1930s and 1980s. More recently, studies on the emergence of the modern consumer society and the bourgeois public sphere have renewed interest in the picture type because of its depictions of fine material possessions and… Full Review

“Why Rajput paintings look the way that they do” is the enormous concept that Molly Emma Aitken addresses in The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. Fortunately for readers entering into her innovative and complex thinking, Aitken is especially gifted in her word choice, graphically evocative, and the book is filled with well-reproduced images of stunning Rajput paintings. Her descriptions of the paintings and the artists who produced them give both the seasoned scholar and uninitiated reader a series of intriguing ideas to ponder. Aitken’s premise is concisely explained in her introduction: conventions used in Rajput painting… Full Review

The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level. It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s… Full Review

Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna D’Souza, in considering MoMA’s feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a “site for community-building and for the utopian… Full Review

If Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) can be called the “Father of the Comic Strip,” then David Kunzle is surely its godfather, for it is to him that we owe the establishment of the comic strip as a subject for scholarship. His two-volume History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–90), today a collector’s item, is still unsurpassed as the basic text about this art form, and he has now published two additional books that also are destined to become basic reference works. The first, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, is a monograph on the artist… Full Review

If only Giorgio Vasari were as clear and straightforward as Nicolas Poussin. When the French theorist Paul Fréart de Chambray petitioned the artist for his definition of painting, Poussin replied: “It is an imitation made with lines and colors on some surface of everything that is seen under the sun, its end is delight (délectation)” (Lettres et propos sur l’art, Anthony Blunt, ed., Paris: Hermann, 1989, 174). Poussin’s response was deceptively simple, perhaps even coy in answering his somewhat pedantic interlocutor. Both doubtless understood delight to encompass, beyond sensual delectation, the goals of instruction and edification that had… Full Review

Over the last decades, historians of Seljuk and Ottoman art and architecture have paid increased attention to the ideological implications of their scholarship; many have worked hard to dispel Orientalist, nationalist, and various other outdated paradigms. Among these, one may count: the need to demonstrate artists and patrons’ Turkish ethnicity in the service of the image of a homogenous Turkish nation-state; the idea that one single genius-artist can represent a nation’s essence; the notion that after the “golden age” of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) experienced decline in all aspects of life; and the repulsion of outside influences… Full Review

Karsten Harries’s commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opens with the interesting suggestion that the key to reading Heidegger’s influential essay is found in its epilogue. What makes the epilogue crucial for understanding the project’s underlying motivations is the manner in which Heidegger evokes Hegel’s famous pronouncement of the death of art. Harries encourages readers to understand “The Origin of the Work of Art” in view of Heidegger’s response to Hegel; in approaching the text this way, i.e., beginning from its end, an illuminating historical twist is given to Heidegger’s ontology. As Harries… Full Review

Eclectic and challenging, What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context seeks to illuminate, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the relation between the functions and objectification of art made in Asia. The expansive intellectual foundations of the book began in discussion of a possible panel proposal for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, and were developed through calls for participation posted to online discussion forums. The result is a provocative book characterized by unusually diverse authors and topics. The specialist reader, accustomed to texts of more narrow chronological and geographical focus, might find the book daunting. Yet… Full Review

Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform by Christine Göttler is an important contribution to the study of Jesuit-sponsored visual culture in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. The artistic style associated with the Counter-Reformation (or the Catholic Reform), usually called the Baroque, was long linked to the Jesuits, so much so that it was dubbed “the Jesuit style” in nineteenth-century German and French art history as a pejorative reference to its propagandistic character. Göttler investigates this issue of control in her study, specifically the question of who is in control of the viewing… Full Review

This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation… Full Review

These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review

Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of… Full Review

Since the early 1980s, there has been a small but steady stream of publications on the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of postcards. Some of the most academically rigorous discussions on postcards have dealt with themes of colonialism, tourism, and representations of cultural and racial otherness. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s edited volume Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1998) stand out as two notable examples. Other publications by collectors and historians in the 1980s and 1990s honed in on specific… Full Review

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the… Full Review