Recently Published Reviews

The language of war in the post-Vietnam era is all about clinical precision: as in “surgical strike,” “smart bombs,” or “friendly fire.” Designed to communicate the idea that brutality, risk, senseless killing, and torture are qualities of the past, this language promotes the belief that war has somehow become clean and non-lethal. The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects, came as a clear challenge to this perception. And yet, as Stephen Eisenman argues in his new book, The… Full Review

Since the early 1990s, several prominent artists, curators, and professors have opened a dialogue to address the definitions and meanings of Jewish American Art. This surge coincided with, but was not part of, multiculturalism and identity-based art and politics. (For clarification, like Bloom I am interested in Jewishness the culture rather than Judaism the religion). Over the past decades many important articles, exhibitions, and catalogues demonstrate how being a Jew has shaped the careers of art professionals, and how Jews in the art market and the academy often saw (some perhaps still do) their status as Jews as something to… Full Review

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 as a frightening vision of a consumerist future; thirty years later he concluded that the world was approximating Brave New World much faster than he anticipated. In his satirical and sinister novel, warfare and poverty have been eliminated, but also family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. In their place, Soma, a powerful drug provided by the “World State,” is taken to escape reality through hallucinatory fantasies. Decades later, in the context of a new century, Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, two assistant curators at the Walker Art Center, titled… Full Review

To adapt John Donne’s famous phrase, no art form is an island, and Ellen Conant aims to confirm this by connecting the relatively isolated art-historical landmasses of the Edo period (1615–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) via a volume of essays focused primarily on the time period 1840–90. Her purpose is to elucidate Meiji arts as part of a continuum of artistic experimentation and innovation during the nineteenth century. In her introduction, Conant asks readers to seek the essays’ “fundamental commonality” (2). These shared themes include an examination of novel art forms in the mid-nineteenth century, a consideration… Full Review

The book of hours emerged from its union with the psalter at the very end of the thirteenth century like ripe fruit dropping off a tree, to use Victor Leroquais’s famous simile. Six independent English horae from before 1300 are cited in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles; twenty-one others span the 1300s (Nigel Morgan Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1982 and 1988; and Lucy Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1986). From this wealth of early English material, Kathryn Smith has selected three personally commissioned books… Full Review

Delhi today is the capital of the nation state of India, and many think of it as the capital of much of India since the late twelfth century, when Muslim political authority established itself in north India. This is, of course, an oversimplification, for there were periods when Delhi was not the capital of any particular regime. All the same, the city has captured the imagination of a number of scholars working on South Asia. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, adds to the already rich literature on Delhi by probing the intersection between colonial authority… Full Review

The title page of Louis Huart’s 1841 Physiologie du flâneur shows two fashionable women walking side by side while a man behind them has stopped on the pavement in order to stare intently at them. The female faces betray their hesitancy as they draw near to each other. The male figure, whose facial features are obliterated, communicates his confidence by the swagger of his pose as he leans jauntily on his walking-stick, a haughty Van Dyck type transposed to the pavements of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. This male walker and observer, the flâneur as social type, has received the majority of critical… Full Review

In 1936, for the cover of the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue, Alfred Barr famously created a flowchart of modernist movements fueling his two chosen strains of non-geometrical and geometrical abstraction. Barr’s recasting of history, which left out not only those modernist movements that did not fit his formalist history but also any mention of the contexts behind their success might be described as an example of what Van Wyck Brooks termed a “usable past.” In his 1918 essay appearing under that phrase, Brooks rejected the literary history of his day as the product of… Full Review

The topic of photography presently affords an excellent case study in the changing styles, methods, and presumptions of art-historical practice. Once a new and marginal offshoot of a very traditional field, photography has become solidly entrenched within the new art histories, in part because the photographic medium lends itself so congenially to many contemporary theoretical preoccupations. At the same time, more traditional catalogues raisonnés, exhibition catalogues, and monographs devoted to the work of renowned photographers are being published. The history of photography is thus at a crossroad—or, rather, a fruitful zone of hybridity. Though occasionally productive of dialogic gaps between… Full Review

“Public history” is a well-established and familiar sub-discipline to students of history. Many universities offer degrees and concentrations in this or a related field. Historians who train in public scholarship expect to pursue work in places where a relatively broad audience encounters the past, including national parks and monuments, historic houses, and museums. As public historians, they pursue research and author historical materials. They may be involved in curating exhibitions, directing educational programs, and advocating for historic preservation, among other, more general administrative duties. Fundamentally, their job is to interpret history for a range of audiences, and to mediate between… Full Review

Herrad of Hohenbourg's Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg's Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript's author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine… Full Review

Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review

The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review

Auguste Rodin enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Great Britain, relishing the company of admiring patrons and fellow artists and exhibiting his work to laudatory reviews. Shortly before his death, he donated eighteen sculptures to the state—the only such donation he made during his lifetime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the British have honored his work in grand retrospectives, including two organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1970 and 1986. In the fall of 2006, the Royal Academy of Arts continued the British romance with Rodin, mounting a new comprehensive… Full Review

In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review