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Patricia G. Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century is a beautiful book about an area of nineteenth-century art that is little known outside of Denmark. Although Robert Rosenblum and Kirk Varnedoe laid the groundwork for understanding the work in a larger European context, the scholarship and publications in English have been modest. Berman rectifies this situation with her well-illustrated and comprehensive book. In Another Light offers an overview of a range of discourses in Danish art, which Berman analyzes as she locates the works in their broader socio-cultural context. When applicable, Berman brings in examples of… Full Review

The art of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) engaged the most crucial historical, religious, political, and literary issues about national identity in Britain with a rigor and breadth scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century British art. His work covered diverse historical subjects, including intimate easel paintings devoted to courtly love and large governmental murals celebrating chivalry and the Battle of Waterloo. The attempt by contemporary art historians to revise the canon of nineteenth-century art has encouraged scholars to study Maclise, but such serious attention to his work is new. Until recently, the lack of scholarly engagement with Maclise has partially resulted… Full Review

As declared on the dust jacket for The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, “Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale.” Often dismissed as a blip by both contemporaries and subsequent historians, the study of ecclesiastics has received limited scholarly attention (excepted for a few good essays and volumes), despite its interested appeal. This book, edited by… Full Review

In looking at modernist buildings, few would be surprised to see ceramic tiles or neocrete coating punctuating the pristine white surface of a rectilinear, multi-level, reinforced concrete building. Projects realized during the interwar period in Japan, however, might also feature wooden pilotis, tatami mats, and thatched roofs. Far from assuming “a style-less style,” as the architect Horiguchi Sutemi claimed of his own creations, the residential, civic, commercial, and recreational structures designed by Horiguchi and his forward-looking peers aimed to create an international architecture, kokusai kenchiku, that expressed the new and modern with distinctive regional inflections. International Architecture in… Full Review

Boris Groys’s Art Power brings together fourteen essays published between 1997 and 2007, and one previously unpublished essay, no date. It ranges over intellectual positions promulgated since the Enlightenment, so the text will be familiar to readers of long-standing disputes about concepts of the modern, the new, the different, the autonomous, the identical, the heterogeneous, et al. All of the essays are written in a philosophical tone, some with astute juxtapositions of art and politics. There are good chapters on Hitler and art and Stalinist dictates in the Soviet Union. Given space limitations, I can only focus on some of… Full Review

Erina Duganne’s The Self in Black and White offers five overlapping case studies of photographic projects created in and around New York City during the postwar period. In four chapters and an epilogue the book explores the photographic practices of the African American Kamoinge Workshop; Bruce Davidson’s “American Negro” project and the Office of Economic Opportunity’s “Profiles of Poverty” exhibition; Davidson and Roy DeCarava’s civil rights photography; DeCarava’s photographs of Harlem; and Dawoud Bey’s “Harlem USA” project. The chapters work together to explore the relational nature of selfhood as expressed through photographic practice. Duganne’s book is an ambitious and… Full Review

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) lived long enough to see his role as founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and dissected. Like John Everett Millais, he was later charged with abandoning his early revolutionary artistic goals and pandering to mainstream taste. Hunt’s popularity represented less of a movement away from early idealism than a gradual refinement and elaboration of it, and the public came to love the work that resulted. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition with the same title, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision offers new insights into how this process unfolded in ten essays, which discuss Hunt’s work from… Full Review

Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus… Full Review

In Winslow, Arizona, an immigration inspector stopped a consular official and asked him to produce identification. Despite the card provided, the inspector doubted the official’s status and demanded to see a laborer’s certificate, perhaps hoping to verify identification through the photograph that was mandatory on such certificates. Although this scene sounds like it could be taking place today under SB 1070, the exchange occurred in 1903, and the consular official was not of Mexican descent. During the period of Chinese Exclusion in the United States, the government targeted Chinese not only at the borders but within the country’s interior as… Full Review

The portrait, defined here as an accurate physiognomic likeness of an individual rendered in an independent image, has been seen as a clear marker of the differences between the representational strategies and priorities of the medieval period and the modern. Indeed, as Stephen Perkinson notes in his introduction to The Likeness of the King, it is tempting to understand “the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a visual symptom marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages” (6). Perkinson counters this with a detailed exploration of how the… Full Review