Recently Published Reviews

Collectors, it sometimes seems, are a necessary evil. Artists create, and we art writers explain the significance of what they make. But collectors, who usually are privileged people, mostly only pick up the check. Too often they treat art as a form of speculation, and so are ready to resell when its value increases. And many of them are not shy about hustling for tips. As a dealer explained to me over dinner, after the newly rich purchase their houses and yacht, they come to his gallery to get their art. Well, they have to do something with their money… Full Review

El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts brings to light a period in Spanish art which, despite the quality of artistic production and the rich history of the period, has been overshadowed by the art produced during the reigns of Philip III’s father, Philip II, and son, Philip IV. Philip III reigned from 1598 to 1621; notably, neither El Greco nor Velázquez, the protagonists of this exhibition to judge by its title, lived at Philip’s court. El Greco had long been settled in Toledo (he died there… Full Review

Reviewing the Van Abbemuseum’s recent exhibition Forms of Resistance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 22, 2007–January 6, 2008), art historian and critic Hal Foster poses the questions, “What is the ‘social’ that ‘desires’ to be ‘changed,’ and how might ‘forms of resistance’ bear on this change? Do radical art and politics converge only at moments of crisis?” (Artforum XLVI, no. 4 [January 2008]: 273). How can we describe the relationship between political activism and the production of contemporary art? While of course there are no simple answers to these questions, editors Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette propose that the concept… Full Review

A curtain of clear plastic sleeves hangs in the shop window that serves as the façade to Ooga Booga’s main space. Inside each transparent pocket rests a simple, photocopied, and staple-bound book available for visitors to touch and flip through. In this modest exhibition of zines and artists’ books, the manner of installation complements the temperament of the work on view. Everything is straightforward and accessible. Ooga Booga, an alternative space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown District, presents for the first time in the United States the complete range of publications issued by the Zurich-based publisher Nieves. Nestled within… Full Review

Curated by Silvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Sciré, the exhibition of late paintings by Titian initiated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and continued with variations at the Accademia was rich in materials from which to learn more about the great Venetian artist. While the Venetian venue showed only twenty-eight paintings, these offered much upon which to meditate. Occupying a space that was once the church of the Carità, and typically used at the Accademia for temporary shows, the paintings were displayed with artificial lighting. At first one wished for daylight, but with time one found that this arrangement worked. The… Full Review

Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans… Full Review

This lucidly written and well-illustrated book examines how the effort to create the appearance of spaciousness in individual dwellings has shaped middle- and upper-class housing in the United States. While recent real estate trends mean that fewer and fewer “middle-class” buyers can afford much spaciousness of any kind, in this book Isenstadt engagingly traces the role and desirability of spaciousness in American housing design. It joins earlier books whose authors have also tried to find larger patterns in the North American residential environment, notably those of Sam Bass Warner, Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Margaret Garb, along with many… Full Review

Is Art History Global? should be read by anyone interested in the history of art as a discipline, and especially anyone interested in its future. The question it asks is of fundamental importance. The problems are clearly outlined and much useful data is presented already in the first part, which includes, besides James Elkins’s introductory materials, three other “starting points” offered by Andrea Giunta (Argentina), Friedrich Teja Bach (Austria), and Ladislav Kesner (Czech Republic). There follows the core of the book: the transcript of a lively seminar that took place in Cork in 2005, involving besides these four figures, Sandra… Full Review

A number of essays and articles published in the last decade have examined the relationship between paintings produced in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (also called “colonial Mexico”) and their counterparts in peninsular Spain in early modernity. Reacting against earlier characterizations of viceregal works as uninteresting or amateurish copies of contemporaneous European prints and canvases, the more recent literature makes a claim that is by now very familiar to historians of colonial art: New Spanish painting partakes of an “Old World” tradition, but ultimately it is an autonomous phenomenon with its own history. Creating the Cult of Saint… Full Review

Astonishingly, The Unknown Monet delivers just what the title promises. Drawing upon a previously unavailable account of Monet’s life, the authors have been able to fill in many of the blanks so frustrating to modern biographers. This material not only provides a very new image of Monet, especially during the 1850s and 1860s, but it offers a new context for his drawings and pastels. The works on paper were included in the final volume of Daniel Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné (Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 5, Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1991)—although not in the more accessible… Full Review

The fall 2007 issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly (vol. 18, no. 4) is devoted entirely to Taliesin, the famous architect’s retreat upon which he had begun construction in 1911 and to which he would invite apprentices to work and live in fellowship with him starting in 1932. (Perched just beneath the crest of a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin, Taliesin derives its name from the Welsh word meaning “shining brow.”) To the delight of Wright aficionados, The Quarterly overflows with dozens of new photographs of this recently refurbished “national treasure” rendered in bright, luminescent color. One older photograph captures… Full Review

In the introduction to this beautifully designed and highly readable book, Alice Friedman asks: “Why were independent women clients such powerful catalysts for innovation in domestic projects?” (15). The most compelling answer she provides is that these clients’ goals were a close fit with the designers’ desire to completely rethink the home, “a redefinition of domesticity that was fundamentally spatial and physical” (16). Friedman outlines a variety of housing that women clients sought when turning to modern architects: some as showplaces for artistic, political, or social activism; others as experiments in non-traditional living, such as single women, lesbian couples, and… Full Review

The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 was a splendid exhibition covering the period from the time Columbus arrived until the moment when emerging nations from Chile to Mexico moved toward independence. Showing it in three dramatically different venues—Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—resulted in three profoundly different statements. In Philadelphia one simply gasped to see such luxury from so many fabulously wealthy colonies (mostly Spanish and Portuguese). When visitors walked through the Mexican show, however, they noticed something different: a preponderance of Mexican works, with the less numerous objects from the Andes, Brazil, and other nations positioned as if to… Full Review

Michael Meister’s review of my book The Temple Architecture of India brings to the fore two basic and interrelated questions about medieval Indian temples. How should one name and classify their various forms? And how were these forms conceived and designed? The review focuses largely on typology and terminology. Meister implies one general criticism: that I do not adequately follow the names suggested for shrine forms by inscriptions and texts. Here the distinction needs to be made between deciphering the intended meaning of architectural categories used in texts with no illustrations, and categorizing, through illustrations as well as words,… Full Review

Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830 is the companion publication to the best and most comprehensive exhibition of portraits, and indeed of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art, not to have come to the United States in a long time. The show, conceived by the late Robert Rosenblum and MaryAnne Stevens, was originally intended to travel to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in addition to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. But construction issues at the Guggenheim prompted the cancellation of the U.S. venue, and the exhibition stayed in… Full Review