Recently Published Reviews

Robert Ryman’s paintings are indifferent to discourse. They require no insider knowledge or textual elaboration. On the contrary, words often only muddy the waters. In Ryman’s words, “You cannot understand painting by explaining something. You can only understand painting by experience” (192). This makes the task of writing about Ryman’s work exceedingly difficult. However, in Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Suzanne Hudson writes with eloquence and perspicuity to bring Ryman’s work to a wider audience on its own terms. The book documents the development of Ryman’s art from the early 1950s to the turn of the century, exploring Ryman’s biographical… Full Review

The two books under review offer distinct takes on the way space was understood and reproduced in the Low Countries (the Dutch Republic, in particular, although both volumes explore Flemish sources as well). Both are concerned with the production of space in two-dimensional forms—in maps, prints, and paintings, above all. And while the arguments and claims made by the respective volumes are not quite mutually exclusive, the implications and trajectories they sketch out are markedly different—heading, in fact, in nearly opposite directions. Elizabeth Sutton’s Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age looks backward to an earlier historiography and to… Full Review

I inevitably discuss Alfred Barr’s 1936 diagram from the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art when I teach surveys of modernism, but I had never noticed a curious point that Gordon Hughes raises in the introduction of his Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism. Of all the movements charted along the way to the two destinations, non-geometrical and geometrical abstract art, only Orphism “goes exactly nowhere” (3). In his sumptuously illustrated and beautifully written book, Hughes takes up the question of why Delaunay—for Hughes the quintessential representative of Orphism—has been relegated to a footnote… Full Review

Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that institution’s first survey of their collection of art by Americans of African descent. Each of the essays in the catalogue provides critical justifications for treating art and craftsmanship produced by African Americans as separate from a larger body of American art, while also noting the tenuousness of doing so. In the catalogue’s foreword, Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) Director and Chief Executive Officer Timothy Rub describes the historical exclusion of black artists within broader institutional art structures, and the unevenness of the PMA in acquiring… Full Review

Greek tragedy and comedy form a central strand of ancient life that we have inherited and made our own: ancient plays are still performed, still inspire new authorship, still inform us about ancient life; but they also established the very genres that continue in our operas, musicals, television, and film. By the end of the fourth-century BCE, any ambitious Greek city had a stone theater of some sort, and remains of ancient theaters are ubiquitous in Mediterranean landscapes. This handsome volume, edited by Rune Frederiksen, Elizabeth Gebhard, and Alexander Sokolicek, presents twenty-six collected papers given at a conference in Athens… Full Review

The global turn in art history is transforming the study of American art, whether that means the art of the United States or the art of the Americas. Since the turn of the millennium, an increasing number of exhibitions, publications, and symposia have been challenging the once-firm boundaries that isolated the Western hemisphere’s national art histories, emphasizing cross-cultural comparison, connection, friction, hybridity, and exchange. I am thinking of exhibitions such as Dennis Carr’s Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (2015) and Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall’s Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (2000); of publications that include Edward… Full Review

Nancy J. Scott has added another biography to the long list of studies of Georgia O’Keeffe. Like these earlier efforts, Scott organizes her book chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a different phase of O’Keeffe’s life and career. However, unlike her predecessors, Scott has had access to the extensive correspondence, which only became available in 2006, between O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer and promoter of early American modernism, Alfred Stieglitz. She quotes passages from this cache of letters, many of which are also included in Sarah Greenough’s My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz… Full Review

In Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), Isidore Isou declares “ISOU will unmake words into their letters,” completing what he identifies as modern poetry’s “phase ciselant” (chiseling or reductive phase)—the avant-gardist project of purifying language of all semantic function inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire’s elevation of form above poetic “anecdote.” Isou founded the literary movement Lettrism in 1946 shortly after fleeing his native Romania for Paris. Kaira M. Cabañas’s Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde shows how Isou’s influential film of 1951, Traité de bave et d’éternité (“Treatise on Venom… Full Review

When Alexandra Stara learned the Louvre was mounting an exhibition accompanied by a catalogue with twenty-seven contributors on the same subject as her recent Oxford doctoral thesis—the Museum of Monuments, as she refers to it—she must have anticipated being run over by a Gallic bus. It is fortunate, therefore, that the Louvre’s publication Un musée révolutionnaire: Le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir (Paris: Hazen, 2016) not only confirms the significance of this short-lived institution, but also does nothing to contest Stara’s core argument: the Museum of Monuments “heralded the modern understanding of artifact-based history” (90). The Museum… Full Review

When a group of late eighth-century Maya painters working at the modestly sized site of Bonampak rendered a dazzling mural program that presented local nobility with pomp and optimism, they were unaware that theirs would be among the final artistic efforts of the southern lowland Maya region. Their paintings, dating to 791 CE, span the walls of a three-room building in the rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, and present confident scenes of military victory and courtly pageantry that appear at odds with the presumed realities of a society in decline. Rediscovered in 1946, these fortuitously preserved works have provided scholars with… Full Review

In retrospect, I see how my experience of the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Tate Modern, like that of many other London tourists, was inescapably shaped by other shows on view at the same time. Visiting one after the other in quick succession, I started thinking of them as a whole, each contributing in its own way to the construction of the city’s curatorial “brand.” The Tate’s recent efforts to foreground women artists—Sonia Delaunay; Agnes Martin, also at Tate Modern (June 3–October 11, 2015); and Barbara Helpworth at Tate Britain (June 24–October 25, 2015) (click here for review)—made a… Full Review

Within years after the end of Reconstruction (the period from 1863 to 1877 during which the federal government controlled states of the former Confederacy and African Americans attained fundamental rights of citizenship), supporters of the Confederacy began commemorating its short-lived existence, its soldiers, and the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the Civil War by placing monuments throughout the South. For the most part, these monuments stood uncontested until the 1970s, when activists and some politicians began demanding the removal of Confederate memorials. Other politicians and activists vigorously defended the monuments, and most still remain in public view. In the late twentieth… Full Review

Lisa Saltzman’s Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects distinguishes itself from most theories of photography, both in content and approach, via a lucid analysis that considers the characteristics of photography less as unique to one medium than as qualities that migrate. She brings together heterogeneous objects that share a distinctive relation to time, identity, and memory, such as Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006), W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001), David Claerbout’s video installation Sections of a Happy Moment (2007), and Vik Muniz’s The Best of Life series (1988–90)—the last of these a palimpsest-like entanglement of photographs taken from drawings… Full Review

Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives, edited by Arthur J. DiFuria, consists of eight essays on the topic. DiFuria’s own introduction is followed by two studies addressing genre painting during the sixteenth century, and, thereafter, five that explore this artistic phenomenon during the seventeenth century, though mainly in the Dutch Republic. According to DiFuria, scholars engaged in the study of genre imagery must contend with its reception, origins, and definition. Hitherto, these critical facets of inquiry (all explored in detail in his introduction) have been approached separately when, in this author’s opinion, they should be treated… Full Review

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco offered a fresh take on the popular topic of twentieth-century domestic design with its 2014 exhibition Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism, organized by the eminent curator Donald Albrecht. This exhibition is part of a spate of shows that has addressed the architecture and design of the period. An exhibition devoted to Charles and Ray Eames is currently making international rounds to various design museums—organized by the Barbican in London before moving on to Sweden and Portugal, through 2017. The press has been phenomenal, describing the “power couple” as the “ultimate examples… Full Review