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

Matthew G. Looper
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 280 pp.; 16 color ills.; 202 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780292709881)
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western readerships closely identified the ancient Maya with dance and bodily performance. The theme of dance is implicit in the sinuous orientalism of Frédéric de Waldeck’s renderings of Palenque relief sculpture published in 1866 (e.g., “The Beau Relief”: see Frédéric de Waldeck and Brasseur de Bourbourg, Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Mexique, Paris: Bertrand, 1866, plate 42). The animated pose of a maize god statue from Copán Temple 22 prompted English colonial administrator and explorer A. P. Maudslay to call the figure “the singing girl” in his documentary volume of 1889 (Alfred P… Full Review
June 14, 2013
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Sarah Betzer
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. 328 pp.; 51 color ills.; 82 b/w ills. Cloth $84.95 (9780271048758)
Sarah Betzer’s Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History opens with a detail of the head of the Valpinçon Bather (1808). Turning the page, the reader is confronted with the steady gaze of Madame de Moitessier, the subject of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s striking 1856 portrait. This pairing visualizes the central problem Betzer seeks to engage: how did Ingres, a history painter who decisively turned attention to the eroticized female form, conceive of portraits of women? And what did the women who sat for these portraits desire to see in them? Betzer’s book is a detailed and sophisticated examination of… Full Review
June 14, 2013
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Sophie Makariou
Exh. cat. Paris: Musée du Louvre in association with Hazan, 2012. 576 pp.; 400 color ills. Cloth €39.00 (9782754106191)
Musée du Louvre. Opened September 22, 2012.
Prior to the opening of the Musée du Louvre’s spectacular new galleries for Islamic art in September 2012, this renowned collection largely had been in storage for the last thirty-five years, with brief reinstallations in 1987 and again in 1993. After such a long and much anticipated wait, the galleries did not disappoint this reviewer; rather, they absolutely dazzled. Five lengthy, successive visits were just enough to get a sense of the sheer depth of this remarkable assemblage, which encompasses the breadth of Islamic art, traditionally defined as extending from Spain to India between the seventh and nineteenth centuries.… Full Review
June 14, 2013
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Dennis P. Weller, George S. Keyes, Tom Rassieur, and Jon L. Seydl
Exh. cat. New York: Skira Rizzoli in association with Minneapolis Institute of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and North Carolina Museum of Art, 2012. 224 pp.; 137 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780847836857)
Exhibition schedule: North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, October 30, 2011–January 22, 2012; Cleveland Museum of Art, February 16–May 28, 2012; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, June 24–September 16, 2012
“See the largest selection of Rembrandt paintings assembled in the United States. . . . Ever.” Such ads helped make Rembrandt in America one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In its last days, demand was so high that an aggressive scalper tried to sell his extra ticket to a senior administrator as she returned from lunch. The show’s success was all the more remarkable given its genesis: curatorial conversations about the links between collecting and connoisseurship. With those links as its defining concept, Rembrandt in America, curated by George S… Full Review
June 6, 2013
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Rachel Poliquin
Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures.. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. 272 pp.; 31 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780271053738)
The eerie title of Rachel Poliquin’s beautifully illustrated and designed book, The Breathless Zoo, first in the exciting new “Animalibus” series edited by Nigel Rothfels and Gary Marvin, immediately calls attention to the contradictions at the heart of its subject. Taxidermy, which can be traced at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a process whereby animals are killed in order to be preserved and displayed, and in which their deaths—deliberate and celebrated in some instances, accidental or mourned in others—linger in the background of that display. The result is an irresolvable tension between the live animal taxidermy… Full Review
June 6, 2013
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Wolfram Koeppe
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. 304 pp.; 262 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300185027)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. October 30, 2012–January 27, 2013
Once in a while an exhibition comes along that achieves many things. It illuminates past and present, and does so by creating a viewing experience both beautiful and instructive. All the better when such an exhibition also brightens up a blind spot in the history of art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens achieved this. Curated by Wolfram Koeppe, Maria Kellen French Curator of European Decorative Arts, the show was a monographic investigation of father-and-son furniture makers Abraham (1711–1793) and David Roentgen (1743–1807), whose workshop in the German town… Full Review
June 6, 2013
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Horacio Fernández
Exh. cat. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2011. 256 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9781597111898)
Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, and Shamoon Zamir, eds.
London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. 288 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $31.00 (9781848856165)
Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
New York: Aperture Foundation, 2009. 240 pp.; 400 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9781597110945)
In their introduction to The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir make a refreshingly straightforward proposition about the historical relationship between the photograph and the printed page: “Ever since the publication of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–46) . . . the home of the photograph has been the book as much as the gallery wall. It could even be argued that the book is the first and proper home of the photographic image from which it moved out to take up residence in the fine art gallery and the modern… Full Review
May 31, 2013
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Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012. 336 pp.; 47 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (9780719084607)
The market that readers of The Rise of the Art Market in London, 1850–1939 encounter is not one driven by an invisible hand. In lieu of focusing on quantitative analyses of the “fiscal exchange value of the work of art” (15), the volume’s editors and contributors trace the tacit, coordinated, and often failed activities of myriad actors—dealers, auctioneers, collectors, painters, museum trustees, the art presses—that underpinned the development of London’s art market within a legible geographical terrain from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar years. The collection thus privileges the theoretical parameters of “cultural geography” and the methods of art… Full Review
May 31, 2013
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Casey Gardner
Limited edition of 57 letterpress printed copies.. Berkeley: Set in Motion Press/Still Wild Books, 2011. 6 pp. Paper $1200.00
"What is alive anyhow?" This is one of the simple, troubling, and eternal questions posed by Casey Gardner's artists' book, Body of Inquiry. Her response is anything but simple. Partly inspired by the Musée des arts et meétiers, a labyrinth of scientific instruments and investigations in Paris, Gardner creates a complex multi-layered work combining the museum, her elementary science classes, technical facts, and an anatomical model called Torso Woman with her speculations on life, science, and death. The result is truly surprising. In the colophon Gardner states that "this book has been on my mind for quite some… Full Review
May 31, 2013
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Leo Costello
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 306 pp.; 31 color ills.; 102 b/w ills. Cloth $119.95 (9780754669227)
Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of these exhibitions brought Turner’s works before U.S. audiences and provided a fresh evaluation of his career; the latter two focused on the artist’s intense engagement… Full Review
May 23, 2013
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Elizabeth W. Easton, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven, Amsterdam, Washington, DC, and Indianapolis: Yale University Press in association with Van Gogh Museum, Phillips Collection, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2011. 248 pp.; 285 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300172362)
Exhibition schedule: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 14, 2011–January 8, 2012; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, February 4–May 6, 2012; Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 8–September 2, 2012
The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Edwin Becker, Eliza Rathbone, and Ellen W. Lee. It features an impressive array of… Full Review
May 23, 2013
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Juliet Carey
London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012. 160 pp.; 100 color ills. Paper £30.00 (9781907372339)
Exhibition schedule: Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, March 28–July 15, 2012
Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (1735). Taking Time celebrates the arrival of Chardin’s painting to Waddesdon Manor, where it joins another famous genre painting by Chardin, Girl with a Shuttlecock (1737)… Full Review
May 16, 2013
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Juliet Hacking, ed.
New York: Prestel, 2012. 576 pp.; 1000 color ills. Cloth $34.95 (9783791347349)
It used to be simpler. When Beaumont Newhall published his first English-language surveys of the history of photography in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the art-historical establishment did not consider photography a legitimate art, and when a modernist did think about the relation of the camera to art, it was often under a cloud of worry that some established painter would be revealed to have used a photograph as his source. Newhall thus began his project from a position of deficit: photography, as he understood it, could be expressive but was fundamentally different from painting and the graphic arts… Full Review
May 16, 2013
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Jill Burke, ed.
Visual Culture in Early Modernity.. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 402 pp.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9781409425588)
Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome, edited by Jill Burke, consists of twelve essays that emerged from a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. They take the art of Rome in the first decades of the sixteenth century as their subject, and collectively foment reconsideration of the notion of “High Renaissance” style. In accord with current scholarship and survey texts, the term “High Renaissance” is understood as a product of historiography only loosely related to the historical period in question and is therefore placed in quotations throughout the… Full Review
May 16, 2013
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Venetia Porter, ed.
Exh. cat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 254 pp.; 200 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780674062184)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, London, January 26–April 15, 2012
Venetia Porter
Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 2012. 96 pp.; 56 color ills. Paper $16.95 (9781566568845)
The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, annually inspires millions of people to congregate at a single place in a manner that is unique among world religions. The British Museum’s 2012 exhibition on the subject was accompanied by two publications that bring together the religious, political, economic, and visual histories of the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the seventh century through present times. For the main catalogue, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, exhibition curator and editor Venetia Porter invited scholars of religious studies, comparative religion, history, cultural criticism, and… Full Review
May 16, 2013
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