Recently Published Reviews

In What Photography Is, James Elkins sets out to write a kind of counter-narrative to Roland Barthes’s highly influential Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), in which Barthes sought to discover the essential nature of photography. Elkins is inspired by Barthes’s slim volume first published in English in 1981, admiring and echoing its non-academic style, yet is irritated by it as well. The emotional core of Camera Lucida is Barthes’s search for, and ultimately discovery of, the “essence” of his recently deceased mother in a photograph he finds of her… Full Review

The recent and controversial transfer of the Barnes Foundation to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia has produced a surge of scholarly interest in the prodigious and quixotic group of Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings known as “the late work.” The largest and most definitive collection of this amorphous body of painting and sculpture, ranging roughly from the artist’s Durand-Ruel career retrospective in 1892 to his death in 1919, was previously located in Dr. Albert Barnes’s original house museum and school in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania. The secluded location and limited access to this magisterial horde ensured the type… Full Review

In 2008, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) commissioned El Anatsui’s large-scale metal wall hanging titled Rain Has No Father? The sculpture utilizes the artist’s signature bottle cap method that has recently helped him attract international attention. Anatsui’s wall hangings are constructed from thousands of used liquor bottle caps, flattened and woven together to create luminous tapestries as magnificent in their formal appeal as they are rich in cultural and historical allusion, and since its acquisition, Rain Has No Father? has become a well-publicized highlight of DAM’s permanent collection. However, somewhat controversially, the work hangs in the museum’s African gallery alongside… Full Review

For decades, much of the scholarship on the history of photography has been dominated by the categories and concerns of art history, with elucidations of photographic genre and expositions of master photographers. In more recent years, however, scholars from across the disciplines have begun to amass studies of vernacular photographic practices, from family albums to scientific photography. Missionary photography is one such set of photographic practices that has long deserved critical attention. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Western Christian missionaries took up the camera to assist their work in a rapidly expanding field of missionary endeavor. Many thousands of photographic… Full Review

Ceremonially integral to Northwest Coast Native American tribes for over two centuries as an emblem of lineage, the totem pole has also become a category of colonial and contemporary visual culture, “a highly complex and multifaceted concept in the popular imagination” (7). The intricacies of its history and layers of associated meanings as an idea, icon, stereotype, and condensation of intercultural dynamics are the focus of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History, a collaboration between art historian Aldona Jonaitis, well known for her publications on Northwest Coast art and culture, and anthropologist Aaron Glass, an emerging Northwest Coast scholar… Full Review

It is tempting to consider this expansive and stunning retrospective as a two-artist exhibition. The first major examination of Jay DeFeo’s career since Constance Lewallen organized an extensive survey of the artist’s work for the Moore College of Art in 1996, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective contains over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and examples of jewelry and sculpture, all made by the artist over the span of almost four decades. But the DeFeo of 1952 to 1966 was one person and one kind of artist, and the DeFeo from 1970 to the time of her death at the age of… Full Review

The exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination was planned, together with a number of other events, to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and was opened by her at the British Library on November 10, 2011. As the BBC website put it at the time, one of the main selling points of the exhibition was that: “All the manuscripts on display were once held and used by medieval royals.” Even if not quite true, the statement suggests the way in which an exhibition devoted to illuminated manuscripts could be sold to the public… Full Review

Halfway through the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, viewers craned their necks back to take in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–02). The monumental painting was reproduced some twenty feet off the ground in the museum’s lofty galleries. The installation approximated the original 1902 display in the Viennese Secession Building where Klimt and his collaborators paid homage to the composer. As one scans the work, gaunt, floating genii on the first wall give way to severe, cowering gorgons on the center panel and an enormous primate glowering dumbly out of a pile of auburn hair… Full Review

Costanza Bonarelli, known previously to scholars as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s bewitching mistress, and beguilingly depicted in his eponymous sculpture (1636–37), is resurrected by Sarah McPhee’s groundbreaking study from being a footnote—albeit a scandalous one—in Bernini’s biography. McPhee succeeds in reconnecting Costanza with her ancestry and repositioning her in the artistic and social milieu of seventeenth-century Rome. This significant contribution to Italian art history, social history, and gender studies offers a portal into the machinations and patronage of art, particularly sculpture, in early modern Rome by way of painstakingly unearthed documents. These documents allow McPhee to parse fact from fiction, and… Full Review

Since his article on “Cellini's Blood” (The Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 [June 1999]: 215–35), Michael Cole has challenged previous notions that late sixteenth-century sculpture was the rather unfortunate product of a decline of innovation and is rife with repetitive references to Michelangelo, as sculptors struggled to survive in the revered master's shadow. In Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence, Cole continues his groundbreaking path in what is, perhaps, his most ambitious project. Cole sets out to resituate Giambologna and his peers in Florence in terms of their artistic goals, which were, he asserts, less… Full Review

Asa Berger’s book An Anatomy of Humor divides comedy into four general functional categories: language, logic, identity, and action (Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993, 6). He then further breaks the collective identity into fourteen individual types of humor that deal with character: before/after, burlesque, caricature, eccentricity, embarrassment, exposure, grotesque, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, scale, stereotype, and unmasking (7). To walk through the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), curated by the Museum… Full Review

In Image Matters, Tina Campt explores a visual nexus of black European subjectivities through an innovative interrogation of vernacular photography. This volume is a beautifully detailed account of Campt's investigation, one that gracefully unfolds its unexpectedly private moments, moving public provocations, and at times chilling accounts of our perpetually returning historical legacies. Campt has gathered a stunning array of photographs from black German family albums for one case study, and, for her other in-depth analysis, selections from the Dyche Collection of the Birmingham City Archive in England. Culled from two distinct black communities, the collections of photographs reveal the… Full Review

That Hebrew illuminated manuscripts are currently a hot topic owes much to a handful of scholars; none more so than Katrin Kogman-Appel who, for the last fifteen years, has published prolifically and authoritatively on the subject. Her 2006 volume, Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday, is an ambitious undertaking that bears witness to its author’s long engagement with this complex and fascinating subject. This is the only book to examine intensively the biblical cycles of Iberian Haggadot, which are the earliest Jewish narrative imagery to appear since Late Antiquity and the first to render… Full Review

The rare publication of an English monograph on Ottonian art is always cause for celebration. Still too little known, the art produced in the Germanic realms in the forty years on either side of 1000 CE is among the most sumptuous and complex of the entire Middle Ages. Although not a survey of the period, Eliza Garrison’s Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II is a fine demonstration of this claim, and Ashgate is to be congratulated on producing a handsome book whose mostly full-page illustrations do justice to the beauty and power… Full Review

John Mraz’s latest book has its origins in the exhibition Testimonios de una guerra: Fotografías de la revolución mexicana, which opened simultaneously in thirty national museums on November 18, 2010, coinciding with the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the revolution. For both the exhibition and ensuing book, Mraz had vast archival collections from which to make his image selection. The Casasola Archive alone, from which many of the photographs presented in Photographing the Mexican Revolution are derived, comprises over 37,000 items from the armed phase of the revolution, not to mention the multiple regional, national, and university photo… Full Review