Recently Published Reviews

Jagged peaks surrounded by swirling mists, pavilions perched precariously on cliffs, wise old men walking along winding, narrow paths: such motifs may conjure the stereotypical image of a traditional Chinese painting for many contemporary viewers. Indeed, many of the fifty-odd works displayed in The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China fit this bill. Yet the curators of this exhibition—Peter Sturman, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Susan Tai, Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art—successfully narrate the politics and human emotions invested in such landscapes… Full Review

The first painting viewers see upon entering the Los Angeles County Museum’s (LACMA) elegantly mounted exhibition, Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, is an anomaly in the Baroque master’s oeuvre. One of the very few portraits that is now securely attributed to Caravaggio (after years of debate), it depicts Cardinal Maffeo Barberini who eventually became Pope Urban VIII. The youngish cardinal is shown seated against a typically Caravaggesque shallow and dark background, wearing delicately sketched, diaphanous sleeves and bisected by a sinuous, horizontal streak of red satin along the inside of his sober but sumptuous robes. Along with… Full Review

Originally published in 1979, Vicente Lleó Cañal’s Nueva Roma: Mitología y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano represented a breakthrough in the history of Spanish art. Along with Jonathan Brown’s Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Nueva Roma was among the first sustained discussions of the social and intellectual bonds forged among Sevillian men of letters, artists, and patrons. Lleó also charted new territory by exploring how humanistic learning informed local architecture, painting, sculpture, and broader aspects of visual culture. In the decades since the book was originally published, scholars have made great strides in… Full Review

In 1839, when François Arago first presented the photographic processes of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce to the French Chamber of Deputies, he declared photography’s utility to the field of archaeology. Thus, photography’s link to archaeology was recognized almost from the outset. In his new book, Photography and Archaeology, Frederick N. Bohrer specifically argues that photography maintains an archaeological way of seeing. As these fields developed through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bohrer argues, they symbiotically influenced each other in a number of ways. He focuses mostly on the roles of photography in the “object-based” practice of archaeology… Full Review

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue for Diego Velázquez: The Early Court Portraits is the third published in an ongoing partnership between the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. Each year visitors to the Texas museum are treated to a new, small exhibition that centers on a work brought to the United States from Spain. El Greco and José de Ribera starred in the first two installments of this series, and in 2012 it was Velázquez’s turn, represented by the Prado’s important early full-length Portrait of Philip IV (ca. 1623–28). The choice could… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews On the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of caa.reviews, it is my great pleasure to introduce a new series of review essays authored by members of the journal’s Council of Field Editors under the rubric “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections.” For some time, members of the caa.reviews editorial board have expressed their desire to increase the number of essays we publish. At the CAA Publications Committee session I organized and chaired at the annual conference in February of this year titled “Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at 15,” the panel (consisting of past… Full Review

Patricia Emison's The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory examines some of the most celebrated works of art of the Italian Renaissance. Its itinerary is not based on a linear, chronological trajectory, but rather on salient issues and works that have defined the field of early modern art history. Emison establishes her objectives in the introductory chapter, stating that her book addresses students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to learn more about specific topics as well as a more general audience interested in acquiring a broader knowledge of this extraordinarily rich period in the history of art. In Emison's own… Full Review

“I am forgetting the art world. It’s going now—and fast” (2). These are the words that inaugurate Pamela Lee’s new book, a study of the impact of globalization on contemporary art practice. They seem initially to describe her growing fatigue with the art world’s rapid fashion cycle of artists, styles, and theorists du jour—an understandable if prosaic exhaustion. Quickly, though, the problem she means to articulate becomes more serious and encompassing, if more difficult to pin down. Detached from the problematics of medium and the social formations of bohemia and the avant-garde, the art world accelerates and sprawls, such that… Full Review

“Not for Beginners” would make an appropriate subtitle for Therese Dolan’s methodologically varied and critically diverse collection of essays on the master of French modernism, Édouard Manet. Noncommittally and appropriately entitled Perspectives on Manet, the volume presents a picture of Manet that is as thought-provoking and smart as it is fragmentary. Dolan makes no apologies for the sense of noncohesiveness among its nine distinct essays. Rather, she explains that it is a testament to Manet’s genius that such a heterogeneous collection of opinions and investigations could arise, and will continue to arise, from his paintings. Indeed, Manet’s… Full Review

For over a century, the history of Mantua and the Gonzaga family’s role in shaping the cultural heritage of early modern Italy has comprised the subject of numerous, often excellent, scholarly publications. Most have focused on specific members of the Gonzaga dynasty—Isabella d’Este in primis—or on their court artists, or on the impact of these individuals’ activities in the fields of architecture, literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. Only recently have scholars begun to explore the social and artistic networks formed beyond the innermost circles of the Gonzaga court; a notable example is Guido Rebecchini’s 2002 volume, Private… Full Review

Lisa N. Owen’s Carving Devotion in the Jain Caves at Ellora presents a thorough analysis of its subject. The expansive site at Ellora has been studied for a long time, but the Jain excavations have been considered a sort of footnote to the Hindu and Buddhist ones there. The site’s chronology has already been established, so Owen does not need to dwell on stylistic analysis to come up with relative dates but instead considers these caves in a much more focused way. Where Jain art has often been treated in a superficial manner, Owen considers from a Jain perspective the… Full Review

Walking through the Ken Price retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, a line from Clement Greenberg’s 1955 essay “‘American-Type’ Painting” ran persistently through my head. Discussing Hans Hofmann, the painter perhaps most responsible for the critic’s analytic apparatus, Greenberg writes: “The difficult in art usually announces itself with less sprightliness” (Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed., John O’Brian, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 223). “Sprightly” certainly describes the ceramic sculptures that crowd the Nasher’s upper and lower galleries. Smallish (except for two late bronzes), with… Full Review

Published on the occasion of the El Greco und die Moderne exhibition at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, this catalogue examines how artists and writers responded to the figure who, after centuries of neglect, experienced acclaim in the decades around 1900. Historians already know the basic outline, for example, of how Julius Meier-Graefe and Roger Fry linked the work of the native of Crete with the concerns of early twentieth-century painters. Many implications of that development, however, remain largely unfamiliar to scholars and enthusiasts alike. The chief contribution of this book is its ambitious illustration of how international artists drew… Full Review

When, in The London Quarterly Review of April 1857, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote that photography’s “business is to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give” (466), she voiced a widely held desire that photography would do two things: first, tell the truth; and second, liberate painting. Eastlake imagined photography’s contribution to art in terms of class, noting that, where once painting had dutifully devoted itself to verisimilitude, photography’s arrival had freed it from that responsibility. “The field of delineation,” she wrote, “having two distinct spheres, requires two distinct… Full Review