Recently Published Reviews

Contemporary art from the Middle East has only begun to emerge from obscurity in the past decade. Its struggle for recognition by the mainstream art world stems from an indefinable hesitation, lack of understanding, and the absence of established standards by which to evaluate it. A handful of major museums have started to collect this art seriously, while others continue to resist such acquisitions, often dismissing them as derivative and of questionable quality. Two recent exhibitions that focused on contemporary art from the Middle East and helped to put it on the map were Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking… Full Review

Charles McClendon’s recent book sets forth, perhaps for the first time in English, a substantial prehistory of medieval architecture from late Roman Antiquity through the “Dark Ages” and the Carolingian Renaissance. Ranging over nearly a half-millennium, he focuses on the period between 600 and 900 in explaining the roots of Romanesque architecture. A lavish scholarly apparatus includes a plethora of carefully placed photographic illustrations, many line drawings, and numerous measured ground plans that closely support the meticulously documented, well-written text. An eloquent celebration of a little-known era of architectural history that is plainly meant for the enjoyment and edification of… Full Review

Many of us have had the experience of walking into a little-known church in a quaint European town where we were so intrigued that we considered conducting research on the church’s elaborate decorations. Unlike most of us, who recognize the daunting nature of such an undertaking, Véronique Plesch has spent the last decade documenting, investigating, and analyzing the extensive fresco cycle by Giovanni Canavesio in the church of Notre-Dame des Fontaines at La Brigue. This church, located about eighty kilometers north of Nice, is home to the most well-preserved of four extant fresco cycles completed by Canavesio in the 1480s… Full Review

The theme of cultural intersection in Ptolemaic and Roman-period Egypt has recently captured scholarly attention, particularly that of philologists and historians. Jacco Dieleman’s Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE) (Leiden: Brill, 2005), for example, and Susan Stephens’s Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) underscore the interlaced debt of Greeks and Egyptians. And with scarce exception, the articles in the often-cited Life in a Multi-cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond (edited by Janet H. Johnson; Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1992) also rely… Full Review

The ninth Clark Art Institute spring conference was organized by Marq Smith, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture, along with Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury, director and associate director, respectively, of the Clark’s Research and Academic Programs. In her opening remarks, Holly noted that a handful of those initially invited to speak declined on the grounds that research was simply what they did and there was really nothing much more they could imagine saying about it. Something of this sense is reflected as well in remarks by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai cited by both Smith and Holly… Full Review

Alice Donohue’s new book examines descriptions of ancient Greek sculpture written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the light they shed on the intellectual history of classical archaeology. She argues that the practice common in archaeological publication of isolating description from interpretation was instrumental in perpetuating a false empiricism, characterized by the denial of the subjective nature of vision. Her inquiry focuses on the historiography of early Greek sculpture, a category that she maintains was evaluated through misguided comparisons with Classical and Hellenistic works, and conceptualized in accordance with theories of stylistic development which inappropriately applied evolutionary models to… Full Review

The greatest gift of the exhibition documented in this catalogue is exemplified by catalogue entry 44 (by Glenn Peers), a small panel of just two figures. The desert father Makarios stands to one side, straight and intensely decorous in the “angelic robe” of the monk, his right hand resting on his long beard, his left lightly raised. Beside him looms a seraph, its upswept wings echoing Makarios’s hood, its cherubic face intent. Gently, it takes the monk’s left wrist in its small, red hand. Monastic inspiration is distilled here in an image of penetrating simplicity. Previously published only once, the… Full Review

“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107) This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to… Full Review

In Japanese Export Lacquer, 1580–1850, Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg quote English collector William Beckford writing in April of 1781, “I fear I shall never be . . . good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, [and] collecting old Japan” (296). Beckford’s idea of “collecting old Japan” is a reflection of the importance that the black-lacquer and gilt-decorated furnishings, caskets, and assorted decorative objects made for the European market came to occupy by the mid-eighteenth century. That the collection of these objects should command a place in this short list of a gentleman’s… Full Review

This is an admirable example of a type of book that is becoming an endangered species: the illuminated manuscript monograph. As one would expect from such a book, it covers everything about the superbly decorated Christina Psalter (Copenhagen, The Royal Library, GKS 1606, 4˚)—from date, provenance, and textual and visual analyses to patronage and interpretations for the intended reader. Although scholars have discussed various aspects of the manuscript in isolation, Vidas’s book is the first comprehensive account and will now become the definitive study. The first descriptive chapter intricately weaves together text and image. Beginning with the flyleaves, Vidas… Full Review

It is delightful to see the first exhibition in the West devoted to the prolific, yet relatively under-studied Meiji artist Yôshû Chikanobu (1838–1893). To date, Chikanobu has been overshadowed by the popular artists of the time, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915). Although Chikanobu’s works are often discussed in books and journals, there has been no monograph or exhibition devoted to him in Japan or in the West; thus both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are significant contributions to the study of Chikanobu’s work and to Meiji prints in general. The exhibition opened in… Full Review

In an interview conducted by curator Jennifer Gross with the contemporary abstract painter Robert Mangold in August of 2004, the artist openly acknowledged his relative unfamiliarity with the Société Anonyme, the progressive, independent art organization that Katherine Dreier (1877–1952) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) founded in 1920. Under the aegis of the Société, Duchamp and Dreier assembled a remarkable collection of modern art, donating the bulk of the holdings to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941 (http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon). As a student at Yale during the mid-fifties and early-sixties, Mangold recalled that he had “seen individual works” at the art gallery… Full Review

By most accounts, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606, as stated by the Leiden chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641. Recently, a few close reviews of the documentation have suggested that the date should be moved to 1607, but this revelation failed to stop the juggernaut already set in motion by museums eager to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The “Rembrandt Year” of 2006 witnessed the staging of dozens of exhibitions across the world, both major loan shows and focused opportunities for museums to showcase their holdings of works by Rembrandt… Full Review

Abstraction is ailing. Ever since Clement Greenberg stopped making the rounds and writing reviews, its health has been on one long, slow decline. Yet as Mark Cheetham insists in his most recent book, this patient simply refuses to die. Cheetham, professor of art history and director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, introduces us to a robust cache of artists (and there are, as he well admits, many more among their ranks), who for the last forty years have insisted on making this presumably terminal pictorial mode their chief idiom. Abstract Art Against Autonomy… Full Review

The questions David James asks in The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geographies of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles begin with a simple problem of space: what is the difference between Los Angeles and Hollywood? Hollywood was once lured to Los Angeles by terrain that could simulate everything from deserts to the Orient, but, as James argues, Los Angeles now tries to create itself in the image of Hollywood. One symptom of this suppression of local geography is that “LA film” has become completely synonymous with “Hollywood film” in the popular imagination. James’s project both continues and revises… Full Review