Recently Published Reviews

The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review

This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body was an attractive and smart show. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, its second venue of three, offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony where Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache—a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire—was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation… Full Review

How should we identify our period style? Twenty years ago, that question would have been easy to answer: we are postmodernists. But these days postmodernism is finished—whether because too many competing commentators killed the concept, or because it was too closely linked to modernism, or because we in the early twenty-first century require our own period style. And so the goal of the sequence of essays given at a University of Pittsburgh-sponsored conference during the 2004 Carnegie International and collected in Antinomies of Art and Culture is to offer a way of identifying the characteristic features of art made today… Full Review

“I do like to hit the nerves,” painter Peter Saul confesses. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it when he does. In the past, whenever I encountered Saul’s paintings—unmistakable with their garish, artificially hot colors and repellant imagery—I quickly withdrew from this frontal assault on my sensibilities. As it turns out, I was shortchanging myself. I rescinded my snap judgments after seeing the first major U.S. survey of Saul’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest curator Dan Cameron. I caught up… Full Review

Most historians of Japanese art are likely familiar with the generous exhibition and publication grants given by the Blakemore Foundation. Older print scholars and collectors may have shopped in the 1960s and 1970s at the Franell Gallery in Tokyo, or used the book Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints, published by Weatherhill in 1975. Some may have heard that the person behind these diverse enterprises was a woman named Frances Blakemore. Before the publication of Michiyo Morioka’s biography, however, it is unlikely that anyone knew much about the fascinating life and artistic career of Frances Wismer Baker Blakemore (1906–1997)… Full Review

Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its… Full Review

In 2001 the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered as the very last work in its large, enormously popular exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School a small painting of a young woman seated at a virginal (a keyboard instrument of the seventeenth century). Presented without fanfare by curator Walter Liedtke and not included in the catalogue, this picture was familiar to specialist scholars: as the final image in Lawrence Gowing’s seminal 1952 monograph on Vermeer, the work had claims to authenticity, but has since encountered doubts. On public view for the first time in half a century, this tiny work sparked… Full Review

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona open their fascinating book on the Arena Chapel by citing both Dante’s famous description in the Inferno of the notorious usurer Reginaldo Scrovegni, and the epitaph from the tomb of his son Enrico (d. 1336), who was buried in the Arena Chapel—the chapel in which Giotto, commissioned by Enrico just after 1302, painted in fresco events from the lives of Anna, Joachim, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, along with a monumental Last Judgment. Derbes and Sandona highlight the radically different opinions offered by these two sources about the fate of usurers in the Scrovegni… Full Review

Giorgio Morandi, 1890–1964, co-organized by the Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first comprehensive survey of Morandi’s work in the United States. The exhibition gathered 110 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings by the reserved, often elusive, and sometimes underappreciated Italian painter of still life and landscape. The curators, Maria Cristina Bandera, Director of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, and Renato Miracco, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, brought together a remarkable selection of works, drawn from both Italian and U.S. museums as well as private collections. There were… Full Review

In the field of Japanese woodblock prints, monographs on single artists, as opposed to catalogues, by academically trained authors—rather than collectors or dealers—are still a relative novelty: Julie Nelson Davis’s is only the third, all appearing in the last decade. But hers has significantly raised the bar. Her study is meticulously researched and documented and has a clear and well-framed thesis and approach. She benefits, of course, from the superlative catalogue by Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark for the 1995 Utamaro retrospective at the British Museum (Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, London: British… Full Review

In 2006, Tate Britain, in collaboration with the Louvre, organized a major exhibition of William Hogarth’s work which travelled to Paris and Barcelona. The exhibition was a hit at the Tate, but its success in drawing both crowds and critical attention to this canonically English artist among continental audiences was unprecedented. Co-curators Mark Hallett and Christine Riding’s accompanying catalogue, Hogarth, reflects the dual purpose of many Tate catalogues, providing a summa of recent research in the fertile field of Hogarth studies for academically inclined readers, while serving as an accessible introduction to the artist for a wider audience, including… Full Review

In an unpublished 1966 lecture on the centennial of Aby Warburg’s birth, Max Adolph, Aby’s only son and at one time his designated successor as director of the Warburg Library, remarked that his father had embodied like no other the virtue Chancellor Bismarck sorely missed in his fellow citizens, namely, Zivilcourage: “Had there been more Germans like this German Jew, we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism and our second war.” The chief merit of Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, first published in Germany in 1998, is to have drawn renewed attention to this side of Warburg’s… Full Review

Margaret Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe is a collection of six studies of familiar and lesser-known masterworks by Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, and Otto van Schrieck. The author skillfully elicits the various political aspects of these works, in terms of gender relations, marriage, social relations, governance, and philosophy; and does so for art objects spanning three centuries, made under and for widely differing circumstances. This range is one measure of Carroll’s erudition. Another is the tools she brings to this complex task: skill in locating the apt source in classical or Renaissance… Full Review

In this rich and complex book, a senior scholar in the field of Franciscan textual studies draws together the leading currents of scholarship on the history of Saint Francis and the earliest decades of the order he founded, fusing studies on visual images and relics with those on lives of the saint, stories of his miracles, and versions of his rhythmical feast, i.e., the text and music devised for his liturgical celebration. In the process Rosalind Brooke provides extensive analysis of large panel images of the saint with scenes of his life and miracles, as well as the frescoes and… Full Review