Browse Recent Book Reviews

A long tradition of scholarship extending back to antiquity praises the surviving monuments in Rome despite their evident alterations. Even the city’s basic infrastructure has received careful attention, since such features as the urban walls originally made for Emperor Aurelian continue to fascinate. In the sixth century CE, Cassiodorus celebrated the still functioning sewers built centuries earlier, remarking: “Rome, what cities would dare contend with you in their heights when they cannot even match you in their depths” (41). Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present is a major accomplishment in tracing the city’s physical developments from its… Full Review

James McNeill Whistler’s first artistic affiliations were French: the “Société des Trois” he formed with Henri Jean Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros in 1858; Edgar Degas’s invitation to participate in the Impressionists’ first exhibition; and his close friendship with French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Whistler called “my second self” (140). Perhaps most tellingly of all, Whistler was furious when the French government displayed his Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (1871) as a “foreign” work. Today, it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay alongside the work of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Degas, but Suzanne Singletary’s fascinating study is the… Full Review

A collection of essays by African, American, and European scholars, A Companion to Modern African Art is a welcome addition to the subject. The volume consists of twenty-nine chapters, arranged in a “roughly chronological order” and subdivided into nine parts. The introduction by the editors (part I, chapter 1) provides the reader a road map for navigating the contents of the book. Part II consists of one essay (chapter 2) by Henry John Drewal on local transformations and global inspirations. According to him, “modernity is not a European invention . . . [but] the result of the interactions and exchanges… Full Review

Mitchell Merback’s latest book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, precisely does not reveal what the enigma of the master engraving is “about.” Rather, it reveals mystery itself as a sixteenth-century therapeutic practice. In so doing, the book provides insight into the endurance and pervasiveness of a lingering stereotype: that transformative wisdom lies concealed in old books, old paintings, and old diagrams from old Europe. This stereotype brings with it rich fantasies about coded riddles that mask transhistorical conspiracies. As Merback is aware, for he uses a fitting epigraph from Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol to kick… Full Review

The cover of the coffee table book Albino shows a Tanzanian girl with albinism photographed mid-twirl, the blue, white, and yellow stripes of her skirt spun out into a full bell around her. The picture, by Spanish photojournalist Ana Palacios, is called Kelen’s Dance, and Kelen spins in the center of a grayish-brown interior, a phalanx of concrete walls receding behind her, green sandals a blur of movement on a lumpy dirt floor, the ceiling a sturdy brown grid. Her face is turned, slightly smiling, her whole body caught in the joy of movement. Upon opening the book, readers… Full Review

One cannot complain that Jackson Pollock is an understudied visual artist of mid-twentieth-century American abstraction. Some of the leading art historians working in the modern and contemporary period have scrutinized and contextualized and theorized this artist’s practice, including Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, T. J. Clark, and Michael Leja, to name but a few. One might have felt hard pressed to imagine a need for more scholarly attention, especially when not occasioned by the introduction of substantial new source documents or a focus on lesser-known works in the oeuvre (1). This puts Pollock’s Modernism, Michael Schreyach’s recent monograph on the… Full Review

The first illustration included in Tirza True Latimer’s most recent book is the oft-reproduced cover to the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art formulated by Alfred H. Barr Jr. Latimer makes the point that the manner in which Barr’s timeline has been taken up since its inception has decontexualized it and forced the diagram into a realm of certainty its supposed simplicity could not sustain. Eschewing the linear altogether and drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s writing on queer theory and time, Latimer focuses on what she describes as the “elliptical.” To quote the author in laying out her intentions for the… Full Review

John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night, curated by Diana Nawi, then associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and assisted by the Jamaican independent curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson, introduced to US audiences the significant and expansive oeuvre of John Dunkley, a seminal figure in Jamaican art history. A self-taught artist, Dunkley worked in Central America and Cuba, returning to establish himself as a barber in downtown Kingston in the 1930s and 1940s while producing a remarkable body of work. This landmark exhibition was the most comprehensive presentation of his painting and sculpture outside of Jamaica and in museum space… Full Review

Phoebe Wolfskill’s Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art offers a compelling account of the artistic difficulties inherent in the task of creating innovative models of racialized representation within a culture saturated with racist stereotypes. She approaches this topic through the work of one of the New Negro era’s most celebrated yet highly elusive artists, Archibald Motley Jr. As a Creole Catholic whose family moved from New Orleans to Chicago prior to the Great Migration, Motley’s personal history registers ever so subtle differences from the more dominant narratives of African American history in the… Full Review

Since its acquisition by the Freer Gallery of Art in 2009, the tea leaf storage jar known as “Chigusa” (Thousand Grasses) has generated much discussion and scholarship, including two exhibitions (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2014, and Princeton University Art Museum, 2014­­–15), a symposium, two workshops, and two books. The present volume results from the symposium and workshops. While the earlier book, Chigusa and the Art of Tea (2014), also edited by Louise Allison Cort and Andrew M. Watsky, is made up of short essays that focus primarily on the object itself, Around Chigusa takes a different approach. The essays create… Full Review