Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. 80 pp.; 16 color ills.; 29 b/w ills. Paper $20.00 (9781606061183)
Exhibition schedule: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, October 2, 2012–February 17, 2013
Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico at the Getty Research Institute aptly starts with an enlarged photograph of Wolfgan Paalen holding a recently painted portrait of André Breton. Standing in front of, but not at all blocking Breton’s enormous painted visage, Paalen stares expressionless at the camera. As the photograph intimates, Breton loomed large over Paalen’s artistic practice and his new community in Mexico, which he named the Dyn group, meaning Greek for “the possible.” Even though Paalen announced his farewell to Surrealism and to the tight strictures of Bretonian Surrealism in particular, it seems that he could… Full Review
August 1, 2013
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Joaneath Spicer, ed.
Exh. cat. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012. 143 pp.; 122 color ills. $25.00 (9780911886788)
Exhibition schedule: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, October 14, 2012–January 21, 2013; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, February 16–June 9, 2013
A woodcut illustration of the known world spreads across two pages of the Liber Chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493. The edges of the map are held in place by Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the three sons of Noah who divided Asia, Africa, and Europe between them and repopulated the human race after the biblical Flood. In this representation, published four years before Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the African continent, the true geographical shape of Africa remains undefined. On the page to the left are images of monstrous races that, according to both classical and Christian traditions… Full Review
July 25, 2013
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Andrea Stone and Marc Zender
London: Thames and Hudson, 2011. 248 pp.; 535 b/w ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780500051689)
At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of… Full Review
July 25, 2013
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Cornelia Homburg, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven, Ottawa, and Philadelphia: Yale University Press in association with National Gallery of Canada and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012. 306 pp.; 200 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300181296)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, February 2–May 6, 2012; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, May 25–September 3, 2012
Timothy J. Standring and Louis van Tilborgh, eds.
Exh. cat. Denver and New Haven: Denver Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2012. 288 pp.; 262 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300186864)
Exhibition schedule: Denver Art Museum, October 21, 2012–January 20, 2013
Just before Christmas 1881, Vincent van Gogh took some of his studies to The Hague to show Anton Mauve, then a well-known painter (and his cousin by marriage). It was his first professional art criticism. As he later wrote to his brother, Theo, “When Mauve saw my studies, he said at once, ‘You are sitting too close to your model.’” No reference to this episode is made in the catalogue or labels for Van Gogh Up Close, but it seems to me quite revealing and pertinent to the theme of the exhibition. Less than a year into his… Full Review
July 25, 2013
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Julia Guernsey
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 245 pp.; 125 b/w ills. Cloth $99.00 (9781107012462)
Monumental stone sculpture, a ubiquitous art form throughout Mesoamerica, is among the most distinctive material features in various Pre-Columbian cultures. Unsurprisingly, stone monuments have traditionally received considerable attention from Mesoamerican scholars in a variety of disciplines. Despite this privileged position in Mesoamerican cultural history, few previous studies have tackled issues related to the function and meaning of monumental stone sculpture in the critical Preclassic period, a time of dramatic social and political transformation, and even fewer have attempted to link the art-historical study of formal transitions in sculptural programs to the anthropological consideration of sociopolitical processes. In Sculpture and… Full Review
July 18, 2013
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William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, eds.
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Asia Society Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2012. 224 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300176667)
Exhibition schedule: Asia Society Museum, New York, February 7–May 6, 2012
Mughal painting is no stranger to the museum gallery, or to the exhibition catalogue. Persian Miniature Painting (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), the publication that followed the seminal 1931 exhibition of Persianate art held at Burlington House, London, featured entries for paintings by the sixteenth-century Mughal masters ‘Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, as well as for two folios from the large-scale Hamzanama (Book of Hamza) manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Mughal painting really came into its own decades later, thanks in large part to The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600–1660 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine… Full Review
July 18, 2013
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Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray, eds.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 380 pp.; 188 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9781409421450)
Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on… Full Review
July 18, 2013
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Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, eds.
Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Number 69.. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010. 164 pp. Paper $24.00 (9781929280636)
Artists whose work engages in critical social commentary have never found a particularly warm reception in Japan, and most of them remain underrepresented. Even today, politically oriented artists find support and exhibition venues more easily overseas. Such has been the case with Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921), an artist who has devoted her life to art and political activism concerning such issues as Japan’s wartime crimes and its victims in the former colonies. Because of such biting content, her art has been better appreciated outside Japan, primarily in North America and East Asia. Turning ninety-two this year, Tomiyama is far from… Full Review
July 12, 2013
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William A. P. Childs, Joanna S. Smith, and J. Michael Padgett, eds.
Exh. cat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2012. 360 pp.; 250 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Paper $55.00 (9780300174397)
City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus. Exhibition schedule: Princeton University Art Museum, October 20, 2012–January 20, 2013
Polis Chrysochous, the modern town in a fertile river valley on the northwest coast of Cyprus mentioned in the scholarly catalogue’s title (but not in the exhibition’s), was, from 1983–2007, the location of excavations by Princeton University’s Cyprus Expedition directed by one of this show’s curators, William A. P. Childs, professor emeritus of art and archaeology. Called “city flowing with gold (chrysos)” since the nineteenth century, the titular City of Gold overlays two rich ancient forebears, which might themselves be considered cities of gold: Marion, a city-kingdom, settled by the eighth century BCE and destroyed in 312 BCE… Full Review
July 10, 2013
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Rubén Gallo
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 424 pp.; 18 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth $32.95 (9780262014427)
In Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, Rubén Gallo details the story of his voyage of discovery to trace the thin lines that connect the great Viennese thinker and founder of psychoanalysis to Mexico, itself represented by artifacts, paintings, publications, and a range of intellectuals affected by a psychoanalysis they variously translated (imaginatively rather than literally) into ways of thinking about modern Mexico. The book is also a substantial work of cultural analysis that both defies the regionalization of culture and area studies by criss-crossing the Atlantic, and it brings into a new perspective aspects of the particularity… Full Review
July 10, 2013
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C. D. Dickerson III, Anthony Sigel, and Ian Wardropper
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. 432 pp.; 437 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300185003)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 3, 2012–January 6, 2013; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, February 3–May 5, 2013
Hard and unyielding, marble is a rock that must be wrestled with by sheer force, exquisite care, and grunt of labor. Human hands require the intermediary hammer and chisel, and touch is distanced in the service of the eye. To give this rock the spark of life is a formidable task, one that few are able to accomplish. Red clay is mud. Dirty, cheap, and plentiful, it is underfoot, low, and common. By dint of water it is plastic and alive, the fingers imprinting an instant record of presence, time, and motion. A mound is grasped—three, four moves,… Full Review
June 26, 2013
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Thy Phu
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 218 pp.; 42 b/w ills. Paper $28.95 (9781439907214 )
One cannot wade too deeply into Asian American studies without encountering the generative, foundational, and divisive concept of the model minority, or the representation of Asian Americans as exceptionally successful minorities (particularly in contrast to other ethnic groups). As described in Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, the figure of the model minority both influenced the late sixties blossoming of a pan-ethnic Asian American social movement, and has propelled contemporary scholarship extending from (and expanding beyond) that formative moment (8–11). To even begin summarizing the body of work devoted to defining, contesting, and revising… Full Review
June 26, 2013
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Peter Chametzky
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 308 pp.; 7 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520260429)
In this important, sensitive, stimulating, but also occasionally irritating book, Peter Chametzky has provided a series of finely argued and well-documented case studies involving twentieth-century German works of art, using individual objects or larger spans of an artist’s career as catalysts for exploring the knotty problem of art’s relationship to history. Chametzky’s chosen examples—objects or artists firmly established in the discussion of German art in the context of modern society and its catastrophic manifestations—include Max Beckmann’s 1913 painting The Sinking of the Titanic and 1930s triptych Departure; Hannah Höch’s large-format Dada collage Cut with the Kitchen-Knife Dada through Germany’s… Full Review
June 26, 2013
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Sally J. Cornelison
Visual Culture in Early Modernity.. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012. 386 pp.; 13 color ills.; 88 b/w ills. Cloth $119.95 (9780754667148)
Born in 1389, Antoninus Pierozzi entered into the Dominican Order in 1405 at the new house of the Order in Fiesole, near Florence. Soon, in spite of his youth, he was called to administer various convents in Cortona, Rome, Naples, as well as Florence, and he actively worked to make them part of the Dominican Congregation of Tuscany, which had been recently established by Giovanni Dominici in order to promote a stricter form of life among the Friars Preachers. Consecrated Archbishop of Florence on March 13, 1446, he died on May 2, 1459, and was lauded among Florentines for his… Full Review
June 20, 2013
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Alena Williams, ed.
Exh. cat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 256 pp.; 100 color ills.; 80 b/w ills.; 180 ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520268562)
Exhibition schedule: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York, September 22–December 11, 2010; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, January 28–March 27, 2011; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, October 7–December 17, 2011; Tufts University Art Gallery at the Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, MA, January 19–April 1, 2012; Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, May 5–June 29, 2012; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, October 19, 2012–January 20, 2013
More than a formal practice of using earth as material, Land art has from the beginning been concerned with social, political, and cultural issues that cannot be separated from the land we inhabit. We know that “landscape” is an ideologically invested term, and artists dealing with their relationship to the land are by no means unique to contemporary art. However, Nancy Holt: Sightlines demonstrates that in the 1960s and 1970s the expansion of media in art played a central role in how Nancy Holt (b. 1938) interpreted the landscape. This exhibition comes at an opportune moment, building on current interest… Full Review
June 20, 2013
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