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Unlike their Mesoamerican counterparts, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan (50–750 C.E.) left no clear record identifying those responsible for developing the sophisticated urban plan of their great city-state; the presumed rulers who commandeered the power and authority to assemble the work force required to carry out the massive construction and artistic programs at Teotihuacan remain unnamed. Although recent excavations at the Pyramid of the Moon reveal high-status burials, there are as yet no clear portraits nor excavated remains that clearly locate specific rulers. Questions about the sociopolitical makeup of Teotihuacan and the identity of their leaders have long preoccupied Pre-Columbianists, yet… Full Review

“There could be no lord without vassals, nor vassals without a lord.” Penned in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias, this deceptively simple sentence serves well to summarize the central argument of Michael Schreffler’s The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. Departing from recent studies that have interpreted seventeenth-century Mexican artworks as expressions of an emergent Creole patriotism, Schreffler offers an enlightening discussion of a series of secular images that reasserted the vicarious presence of the Spanish King in colonial Mexico. These images, Schreffler argues, embodied the sense of mutual dependence that existed in… Full Review

Sidi Ballo’s masterful performance on a June night in Mali in 1978 was for Patrick McNaughton “a galvanizing event” whose memory stayed with him for three decades and inspired his writing of this book. As he so aptly notes, not all Malian masquerade performers are created equal. I share with him that sentiment. I know from my own work in Mali that it is only a rare and exceptional artist whose performance reveals the full power of the masquerade and whose virtuosity can so decisively imprint its memory on those who experience it. McNaughton skillfully sets the scene in… Full Review

Rhetorically, New York City has long wielded artistic agency in postwar art. For instance, the metropolis apparently stole the idea of modern art away from Paris (according to Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]) and subsequently named its own school of painters (The New York School). Despite this centrality, however, few scholars have rigorously investigated the complex interactions between artists and the city itself. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon tackles precisely this issue as it transpired in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s… Full Review

Carole Paul’s The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour is an analysis of the shifting attitudes toward collection and display—form, content, and contexts—in the world of Settecento Rome. With a focus on the Borghese’s Galleria Terrena, the suites where most of the family’s paintings hung, and the Casino Nobile, home to the sculptures, Paul examines the interrelated narratives of aristocratic patronage, grand tour sociability, the international aesthetic landscape, and the development of museums. Her arguments rest on a detailed reading of the redesign of the Borghese galleries under Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV… Full Review

In the introduction to African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present, Celeste-Marie Bernier positions her study in relation to a widely recognized problem within African American art history and criticism: In my view, far too many critics celebrate African American artists solely for their ability to survive political disenfranchisement, racist brutality and cultural annihilation, rather than for the ground-breaking formal qualities and aesthetic properties of their art. Traditionally in African American art criticism, artistic issues have been discounted in favour of their sociological, biographical and historical implications. Similarly, attempts by scholars to define a black… Full Review

When Pop art emerged in the early 1960s it was greeted by both its critics and its defenders as a celebration of the various facets of popular American culture featured in the works themselves. By the end of the decade, however, some critics and historians were already arguing against the hegemonic view of the movement by claiming that certain of its practitioners, at least, were using popular subjects and styles to challenge mainstream cultural values. Michael Lobel’s monograph on the early work of James Rosenquist is the latest addition to that ongoing scholarly current. Since its exhibition in… Full Review

The Japanese term surimono refers to privately commissioned prints intended for circulation to a limited group of individuals in connection with some special occasion or significant event. As such, they reflected the interests of the groups to which they were sent, and they almost always differed in distinctive ways from contemporary commercial prints put out by the same publishers. There are a number of features that set them apart. One is the expensive pigments and meticulous techniques employed in their printing. Another is that most—though not absolutely all—bear poetic inscriptions. This is a feature that surimono share with numerous earlier… Full Review

Alison Stewart has a bone to pick with both academic publishers and art-historical scholarship. Although scholarly research demonstrates that painting in the first half of the sixteenth century was one among many artistic media, such as woodblock prints, tapestry, stained glass, metalwork, etc., art historians and publishing houses distinguish painting from the other arts and give preference to it, following an inclination that did not exist in the early modern period. For example, Stewart claims that one could easily deduce from modern literature that Pieter Bruegel the Elder invented the theme of peasant festivities. Bruegel’s paintings of peasants are taken… Full Review

The brilliant women of this book’s title were the remarkable writers and artists in eighteenth-century England known as bluestockings, a name first applied to both sexes for the blue worsted stockings worn by a gentleman who attended the literary salon hosted by Elizabeth Montagu, one of the original bluestockings. By the 1770s, however, the term was associated specifically with intellectual women. Co-authors Elizabeth Eger, lecturer in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature at King’s College London, and Lucy Peltz, eighteenth-century curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, produced this attractive volume to accompany the exhibition of the same name. The book traces… Full Review