Recently Published Reviews

War/Photography, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (click here for review), is a massive and important book. Topping out at 606 pages with hundreds of photographs gathered from archives around the world, War/Photography is now and will be for many years a crucial resource for anyone working on war and photography. According to the authors, most notably Anne Wilkes Tucker, the chief curator and engineer of the project, “the primary goal . . . has been to expand the discourse about photographs of armed conflict and… Full Review

Hung Liu’s Offerings at the Mills College Art Museum and Summoning Ghosts at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) offer complementary but distinct selections of works, thus avoiding the potential redundancy of two closely timed exhibitions in Oakland, California. The more intimate exhibition Offerings showcases her explorations in installations that employ recurrent metaphors for journey. Contrastingly, Liu’s retrospective Summoning Ghosts nicely chronicles her evolving imagery and processes for more than twenty-five years. While Liu clearly possesses an affinity and dexterity with paint, more surprisingly, the exhibitions highlight her explorations in mixed media, shape, and installation. Additionally, the exhibitions’ complicated mix… Full Review

Originally published in Japanese in 1999, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty (Meiji Kokka to Kindai Bijutsu: Bi no Seijigaku) by Satō Dōshin was hailed as the culmination of the ongoing attempts by some Japanese art historians, including Satō himself, to adopt a more self-reflexive approach to their own discipline.[1] Throughout the book he argues that, although the narrative of Japanese art history was constructed as a "self-portrait" to be presented to the West, the implicit significance of its origin and reception were never arduously scrutinized almost fifty years into the postwar period. His study… Full Review

Japanese art historians spend a great deal of time analyzing subject matter and style in order to shed light on the significance and production contexts of ancient artifacts. In this regard, the format of a given work, its state of preservation, its setting or provenance, and its inscriptions can provide important information. So, too, can a comparison of works by the same artist, same subject matter, or same subjects and textual sources that document the environment in which these artifacts were created. But what if the object in question originally functioned with the accompaniment of written commentary, such as ritual… Full Review

Michelangelo is the best-documented person of the early modern period, including his more famous and more powerful contemporaries. Even before he died at the age of 89 on February 18, 1564, the artist boasted three published biographies, a short one by Paolo Giovio published in 1546, and the longer texts by Giorgio Vasari of 1550 and republished in expanded form in 1568, and one by Ascanio Condivi, published in 1553. There are about 1,400 letters to and from the artist, dating from 1496 to four days before his death, in addition to a large amount of ricordi, entries in… Full Review

In January 2006, the Portland Museum of Art acquired Winslow Homer’s studio from the painter’s great-grandnephew. The studio sits above the water on Prouts Neck, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland that separates the northern edge of Saco Bay from Homer’s muse—the rocky, wave-beaten, and occasionally deadly coast of the Atlantic Ocean. During the past six years, with the assistance of architectural historians, engineers, and designers, the museum restored the studio to pristine condition. To celebrate the achievement, this past fall and winter the museum exhibited Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine. Weatherbeaten features paintings, watercolors, prints, and… Full Review

The contributors to the exhibition catalogue Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video agree: a mid-career retrospective of Weems’s work has been long deserved. Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes in the book’s foreword that Weems is best known as a visual and verbal rhetorician, a narrator of history, and one who uses photography and video to ask hard questions about identity and American culture. These aspects of Weems’s work provide the book’s contributors with an analytical foundation from which to explore the African American artist’s varied practice. Consequently, editor Kathryn E. Delmez and authors Gates, Franklin Sirmans, Robert… Full Review

To any student of art history for whom the painter Federico Barocci (ca. 1533–1612) had been relatively unknown—one of a shrinking demographic, perhaps, given the scholarly attention to post-Tridentine Italy and to Barocci specifically over the past twenty years—the Saint Louis Art Museum’s exhibition devoted to his artistic activity provided a thorough and visually splendid introduction. The exhibited works spanned almost his entire career, ranging from a compositional drawing (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/Graphische Sammlung) for Barocci’s earliest extant painting, Saint Cecilia with Saints Mary Magdalen, John the Evangelist, Paul, and Catherine (ca. 1556) in the cathedral of Urbino, to late-career paintings of… Full Review

The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece is an exhibition of about one hundred objects of Greco-Roman art drawn entirely from the collection of the British Museum. The show was in many ways welcome. Public displays of ancient art are in short supply on the West Coast north of Los Angeles, and the British Museum, of course, has one of the world’s great collections of this material. While most of the items included in The Body Beautiful are more often in the British Museum’s storerooms than their display vitrines, the exhibition was not without its stars, such as a red-figure kylix… Full Review

Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic are timely additions to a flourishing discourse on the instruments of modernity within the larger history of Ottoman visual culture. In a tightly edited and richly illustrated volume of sixteen essays, Scramble for the Past situates the practice of archaeology in the empire as a continual tug-of-war played out in global and local arenas of politics, science, and culture. The essays destabilize prevailing hegemonic narratives to make space for and locate Ottoman… Full Review

The Hakuhō period (ca. 650–ca. 710) has tended to be treated as a time of transition overshadowed by its preceding Asuka and succeeding Nara periods; indeed, its time span and even existence independent of the Asuka and Nara are controversial. Nevertheless, the corpus of small gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture, a genre of art pieces characteristic of this era, shows an extremely rich variety in style. Donald F. McCallum’s Hakuhō Sculpture is the first book-length publication exclusively devoted to gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture from the Hakuhō period. McCallum examines the stylistic evolution of Hakuhō sculpture and reassesses its artistic achievement; he argues that… Full Review

Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes… Full Review

As one might expect, the retrospective exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s work at the National Gallery of Art is, quite literally, explosive. In spite of their familiarity, the bursts of color and graphism still manage to excite. The surprise of Lichtenstein’s technique and source material may have worn over time, but his oeuvre, laid out across fourteen rooms spanning three decades, offers new moments of revelation. Alongside the well-known cartoon melodramas of love and war are early abstractions in an imitative expressionist style; late, expansive canvases inspired by Chinese landscape painting; peculiar forays into a mock-Art Deco manner; and a vast… Full Review

There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic. (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-third Letter) In 2002, Jacques Rancière published an essay in the New Left Review discussing Schiller’s famous fifteenth letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 [March/April 2002]: 133–51). Written in 1795, just after the French Revolution had turned to Terror, Schiller tried to resolve the discrepancy between nature and cultural refinement, positing that the human need to play can bridge… Full Review

The Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1576–77), is unrivaled in its centrality to an understanding of the contact period of central Mexico. Although it has been amply appreciated and studied since the late nineteenth century, its ongoing ethnographic, linguistic, and historical utility cannot be overstated. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún spearheaded the encyclopedic colonial project in collaboration with a team of indigenous scribes and painters. His final edition has a richly laden content recorded in three modes: Spanish, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and an extraordinary array of images that constitute a… Full Review