Browse Recent Book Reviews

Near the end of Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience, Neil Harris concedes that “[i]nstitutions are much more than the sums of their staff and supporters. They change over time, effacing the impact and even the memory of their earlier leadership” (508). Nevertheless, he argues that the impact of an exceptional director can be profound. Such was the case with J. Carter Brown and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Harris identifies his book as an “institutional biography” of the gallery, neither a biography of Brown… Full Review

In his new book, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East, Ali Behdad connects Orientalist theory, photographic history, and the politics of the Middle East. This disciplinary confluence positions photographs in a cross-cultural dynamic where they “play a performative function in producing certain cultural and political meanings” (13). Camera Orientalis arrives on the heels of critical contributions from the fields of history, the history of art and science, as well as anthropology. Authors such as Ahmet Ersoy, Nancy Micklewright, Mary Roberts, Staci Scheiwiller, Edhem Eldem, Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Morton, Christopher Pinney, Deborah Poole, Patricia Hayes, and Deborah… Full Review

Edward Sullivan’s book-length disquisition on Francisco Oller is an engaging narrative that traverses a wide historical range, from the personal to the national to the transnational and to artworks and their histories. Oller, whom Sullivan describes as the most prominent Caribbean artist of the nineteenth century, lived and painted during a period of intense social and political transformation. Born in 1833 in Puerto Rico to a father who had migrated there from Spain, Oller was forty by the time slavery was abolished. During his lifetime, Puerto Rico went from being a Spanish colony to a US dependency, with Oller capturing… Full Review

Kellie Jones’s South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s illuminates a blind spot in existing histories of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Those who know Los Angeles know that the area “south of Pico”—dominated by the north-south arteries of Central and Crenshaw avenues, which connect the neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, Leimert Park, and Baldwin Hills—has historically been the center of black life in the city. As Jones writes, Pico Boulevard is a physical “demarcation of division” that also represents a “hidden history of blackness” (15). Written in highly readable, compellingly detailed prose, South… Full Review

When teaching a course on the art of Mesopotamia, perhaps the greatest challenge has been the absence of a current textbook on the subject. As Zainab Bahrani notes in her introduction, “since the mid-twentieth century, books on Mesopotamian art have fallen out of favor” (8). This lack may be explained by the opinion of some scholars that the ancient Near East produced no art at all, on the assumption that the category of “art” excludes objects created for other purposes. The standard text in the field, Henri Frankfort’s The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, was first published… Full Review

In late December 2015, American abstract master Ellsworth Kelly passed away at the age of 92. A month and a half before his death, Kelly had said to The Guardian that he “want[ed] to live another 15 years.” This zest for life came from his unwavering commitment to art making. In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Kelly produced over 1150 paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and large-scale commissions—works of bold shape and color that reveal his distinctive approach to abstraction inspired by visual experience. He also left behind numerous drawings, collages, and sketchbooks that document a wealth of ideas, some… Full Review

In the present cultural moment, the unearthing of previously obscure queer heroes is a much-needed balm to the rightward swing of the political pendulum. When asked to write this review, I admittedly came seeking some of that particular brand of soothing. I approached Joseph Grigely’s edited volume Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock as a curiosity of those heady days of queer New York, before the pall of the plague years descended upon us all. My experience of the text was filtered through that golden glow we so often ascribe to a largely imagined better time. It is certainly… Full Review

In the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts appears a portrait of an Afro-Caribbean woman bearing a platter of tropical fruit and seated in front of a mountainous landscape. She is likely Marie-Thérèse Zémire, enslaved in Haiti and then in Montreal by the Québec-born François Malépart de Beaucourt. Beaucourt, an artist by trade, painted Zémire in 1786. The painting was originally titled Portrait of a Negro Slave and was renamed Portrait of a Haitian Woman by museum curators in the twentieth century. Yet little in the painting or its present title, as Charmaine Nelson points out, alludes to the historical fact… Full Review

In February 2015, music artist Jidenna released the video to his first single, “Classic Man.” Directed by Alan Ferguson, the video opens with Jidenna getting dressed: he tightens his tie up to his club collar, fastens his cuff links, and steps into his cap-toe oxfords. In a subsequent scene, he walks the streets of Brooklyn surrounded by a group of well-dressed black men in suits. When he spots two young men being handcuffed by two police officers, he intervenes. We don’t know what he says, as the track of the song is still playing, but viewers see Jidenna smile cordially… Full Review

The role that religion has played in the cultural production of the last three centuries is something that many art historians have been slow to recognize and/or hesitant to acknowledge. The potential pitfalls of pursuing this subject are myriad, the most obvious being that of appearing to endorse any theological doctrine—a cardinal sin against post-Enlightenment scholarly disinterestedness. For historians of modern art, consideration of religion is particularly difficult given the extent to which the avant-garde has counted works with overt religious content as inferior or kitsch. However, a number of scholars—among them James Elkins, David Morgan, and Mark C. Taylor—have… Full Review