Recently Published Reviews

In her provocative new book, Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin presents an innovative approach to visual and photographic studies. Her essays form interrelated and often fascinatingly oblique case studies pertaining to the use of photography and its metaphorical affect as tactility and touch. Olin offers deep embraces of photographic discourse in James Agee and Walker Evans’s New Deal-era text and photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; James VanDerZee's Harlem photographs produced during the 1920s and 1930s; photographic references in the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and W. G. Sebald; "empowerment" projects such… Full Review

The complicated relationship between war and photography is the subject of a massive exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Entitled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, the exhibition includes more than 500 objects (pared down from over 2,000 initially under consideration) that range from photographs and photographic equipment to books, magazines, and albums. Produced by more than 280 photographers from 28 nations, the exhibition covers wars that occurred over six continents, beginning with the Mexican-American War in 1846 and culminating with the 2011 civil war in Libya. Yet, rather than organize this extensive material chronologically… Full Review

In 1953 German art historian Otto von Simson, writing in the pages of The Art Bulletin, heralded Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition (ca. 1435) in the Prado as "the birth of tragedy in Christian art" (Otto G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 [March 1953]: 9–16). Well-timed to coincide with post-war philosophy's Nietzsche revival, the claim was grounded in a conventional scholarly alignment of visual fact (the famous rhyme of Christ and Mary's bodies) and prevailing currents of religious culture (in particular the… Full Review

“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education of the laity that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reform. Through the mediation of archbishops and bishops who supervised parochial clergy, the reformers sought… Full Review

Chinese characters have assumed a position of supreme cultural power and authority within traditional Chinese society since their creation more than five thousand years ago, and calligraphy, the art of writing characters, is among the most ancient, venerated, and lasting Chinese art forms. Today, every child in China practices calligraphy in public schools or with private tutors. In public parks, retirees dip giant brushes (sometimes even mops) into water and write calligraphy on the ground as a means of physical exercise as well as art practice. Bookstores feature a large selection of guidebooks on calligraphy, most of them reproductions of… Full Review

In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,” Weltkunst 5 [April 1931]: 2–3). As Keith Holz sums up in “After Locarno: German Artists in the Parisian Picture Factory,” included in Academics, Pompiers, Official… Full Review

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, James Henry Breasted (d. 1935) became the most famous American Egyptologist of his generation. He was known not only for his historical scholarship, embodied in A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), a massive book published in 1905, and the five volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), published in 1906–07—achievements that led to his appointment to the first professorship in Egyptology in the United States, which he assumed at the University of Chicago in 1905. He was also widely known for many semi-popular and popular articles, guides… Full Review

Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet day prompted questions often triggered by performance exhibitions: How should dancers, actors, or musicians navigate the shift from black-box theaters to white-cube galleries? Can… Full Review

Nigel Hiscock has devoted a substantial portion of his career to an exceedingly difficult study: the symbolism of medieval ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, he must wrestle with a frustrating historiography whose pendulum swings between the assumption and denial of meaning in medieval architectural form; a spotty documentary record whose contributors, little concerned with questions of interest to modern scholars, rarely reference subjects like architectural training or the symbolic intent of plans; and data collection and analysis that, until the arrival of digitization, meant painstaking manual measurement and calculation. The Symbol at Your Door, intended to complement Hiscock’s The… Full Review

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay argues for the centrality of modeling in clay to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s total conception of sculpture (also reviewed here in caa.reviews), ranging from the placement of one or more bodies and their limbs in space, down to the treatment of folds of drapery, locks of hair, and the articulation of the elasticity of flesh—regardless of whether the intended sculptures were to be cast in bronze, carved from marble or travertine, or modeled in stucco. Bernini sought to match both the suppleness and tensile strength of his clay models, which he could, in the words of… Full Review

Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography encourages readers to imagine a new discourse for the study and treatment of photography. Expanding upon ideas found in her book The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review), Azoulay proposes to consider photography as an ongoing public event that began with the emergence of photographic consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Ever since, she asserts, the existence of photography and the awareness of its omnipresence have normalized and conditioned the physical and psychic behaviour of human beings to comply with the moral… Full Review

In his beloved book Invisible Cities (1972), fable writer Italo Calvino invents short conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan and descriptions of cities recounted by the Italian from his travels. Ten artists from across the globe have loosely translated this charming conceit in an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), curated by the museum’s Susan Cross. As with Calvino, the artists that Cross selected have reimagined cities of various scales and materials as places of growth, death, pleasure, desire, decay, and memory. To cite Calvino: “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains… Full Review

Upon first entering the exhibition William Wegman: Hello Nature, a viewer’s eye is drawn to the title wall, which features a large-scale reproduction of a family gathered around a campfire beside a lake. The addition of paint enhances the scene so that the feet of a boy appear to grow roots, and foliage stretches the treetops toward the ceiling. For those most familiar with Wegman’s photographs of his beloved Weimaraner dogs, the introductory image is a revelation. While best known as a video artist and photographer, Wegman is also a prolific painter and draftsman, and the title wall anticipates… Full Review

Carol Quirke’s Eyes on Labor is an assiduously researched and impressively crafted study that examines the depiction of workers and unions in American news photography, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s. During this era of rapid unionization, Quirke argues, photography became a key medium in the battle between labor and capital, as corporations, unions, and the news organizations that recorded the conflicts between them “sought to harness [photography’s] apparent objectivity to make competing claims about workers, unions, labor’s aspirations, and ideals for labor-management relations” (17). Quirke explores not so much how news photography reflected labor conflicts, but rather how photojournalism… Full Review

The exhibition Feminist and . . . has a provocatively short title, whose first word has been defined many ways since it was adopted from France in the late nineteenth century. How might six women artists of different generations, national origins, and ethnicities interpret the term now? The curator was Hilary Robinson, who was a professor of art theory and criticism at Carnegie Mellon University until January of this year, when she became Dean of Art and Design at Middlesex University. She has frequently written about gender issues in the visual arts. There is no catalogue. What is “feminism”… Full Review