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

Frances Ames-Lewis, ed.
Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 464 pp.; 48 color ills.; 234 b/w ills. Cloth $175.00 (9780521851626)
This excellent volume, one of seven published, forthcoming, or projected in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, traces the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence between 1300 and 1600. Organized chronologically, the book divides these centuries into eight sub-periods, each the focus of a separate chapter. Francis Ames-Lewis, Florence’s editor, summarizes the aims of the series and this volume in his introduction: individual authors were charged with describing the major achievements of each period while also reexamining Florentine Renaissance art within a “broader artistic and cultural context” (2) in order to produce, together… Full Review
February 8, 2013
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Exhibition Schedule: Rockwell Museum of Western Art, Corning, NY, June 8–October 14, 2012
Jason Cytacki’s visually compelling cowboy paintings, on view at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York, have appeal for diverse audiences: lovers of art of the American West, classic Western movie buffs, and those fascinated with Americana. The exhibition, Enduring Legend, Fragile Myth: Cowboy Paintings by Jason Cytacki, is comprised of twenty-two paintings in three related series, which are intermingled in one gallery. The first series—the toy series—is from Cytacki’s MFA thesis, and consists of six large paintings, which are based on photographs of dioramas that feature toy cowboys placed in suburban neighborhoods. The… Full Review
February 8, 2013
Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2011. 240 pp.; 227 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780895511454)
Exhibition schedule: Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, October 16, 2011–February 26, 2012
C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, eds.
Exh. cat. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011. 432 pp.; 267 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783775730037)
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, September 4–December 4, 2011; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, February 4–July 29, 2012
Two recent exhibitions, Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum, and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), complicate and extend previous scholarship on the Chicano art movement, focusing in particular on the theme of artistic collectives. While previous analyses of the group Asco (such as C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderberg, ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 189–208) emphasize the fact… Full Review
February 8, 2013
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Denise K. Cummings, ed.
American Indian Studies.. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. 340 pp.; 36 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780870139994)
In her essay, “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory: Printup Hope, Rickard, Gansworth,” literary scholar Susan Bernardin writes that she is learning to “see what has been invisible for too long in discussions of Native American literary studies: the informing, vital lens of indigenous visual arts” (162). With this statement, Bernardin underscores the purpose and the voice of the collection of essays entitled Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, edited by Denise K. Cummings, in which “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory” appears. The book originates in the fields of literary and cultural studies, and all of the contributors deftly… Full Review
January 31, 2013
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Josh Ellenbogen
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. 280 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $74.95 (9780271052595)
For historians of photography, Josh Ellenbogen’s Reasoned and Unreasoned Images provides a significant theoretical discussion of photography’s aim to capture the visible and non-visible and, more widely, of its complex relation to human perception, cognition, and memory. The book undertakes close examination of the photographic oeuvres of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) as approached through the work of philosopher of science, physicist, and mathematician Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). Through this approach, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images becomes both a work of the philosophy of science and the history of photography. Indeed, this is its greatest strength… Full Review
January 31, 2013
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Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 284 pp.; 39 b/w ills. Cloth $119.95 (9781409424222)
Forty years ago, when I graduated from college, I applied for a year’s traveling fellowship to take me around the Mediterranean to study the reuse of ancient materials in medieval buildings. The committee rejected my application, telling me (off the record) that it was a “stupid” topic. Little did I know that a few years earlier, the German scholar Arnold Esch had begun a lifetime’s career publishing on that very subject (beginning with “Spolien. Zur Wiederverwendung antiker Baustücke und Skulpturen im mittelalterlichen Italien,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 51 (1969): 1–64), and forty years later “spoliology” has developed into a burgeoning… Full Review
January 31, 2013
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Charles Palermo
University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008. 282 pp.; 26 color ills.; 37 b/w ills. Paper $54.95 (9780271029726)
The significance of Charles Palermo’s Fixed Ecstasy for scholarship on Joan Miró, and for modernist studies in general, is undiminished by the fact that after five years its only review appeared in France soon after the book’s publication. Palermo’s study not only breaks new ground by reevaluating Miró’s relationship to Surrealism, but also elucidates the stakes of the artist’s commitment to automatism. Encouraged to abandon a narrow view of automatism as a mere technique or as the suppression of conscious control, readers discover it to be a mode of experience that, when represented, evokes effects of continuity and separation between… Full Review
January 24, 2013
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Jennifer Jane Marshall
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 240 pp.; 61 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (9780226507156)
The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Machine Art exhibition of 1934 is one of those events that historians love, seemingly so rooted in its time and place that it all but becomes a metaphor, a defining moment of high modernism. Even the catalogue is iconic. With its cover photograph of a complex ball bearing system—all circles within circles—silhouetted against a black field, its lofty quotes from Plato and Aquinas, Josef Albers’s clean page layouts, and its crisp photographs of industrial equipment and household items, the publication exudes self-assurance and conjures a world of endless perfect forms in steel and glass… Full Review
January 24, 2013
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Samuel Vitali
Römische Studien der Bibliotheca Hertziana, vol. 30.. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2012. 344 pp.; 16 color ills.; 216 b/w ills. Cloth €98.00 (9783777442914)
Between about 1591 and 1592, Annibale Carracci, his older brother Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico decorated the main room of the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna with a cycle of frescoes depicting the life of the mythical founder of Rome, Romulus. Since their unveiling, the frescoes have been recognized as among the seminal achievements of the Carracci. The seventeenth-century art critic Giovan Pietro Bellori was particularly fulsome with his praise, writing that the cycle “renders the name of the Carracci glorious in all aspects of painting, and principally in coloring, for it is believed that none better was produced by their… Full Review
January 24, 2013
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Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds.
London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 256 pp.; 15 color ills.; 58 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9781861898722)
What does it mean to picture atrocity, to take photographs of death, destruction, and suffering, to hold those iconic images in our minds? Nearly forty years ago, Susan Sontag took up such questions in her essay “In Plato’s Cave” (in On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), questions that would haunt her writing to the very end, be it in her last collection of meditations on the medium of photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), or in its addendum, the 2004 essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” published in the… Full Review
January 16, 2013
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Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, eds.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 208 pp.; 38 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Paper $34.95 (9781444333602)
As a practice based in ideas, ephemeral actions, and linguistic provocations, Conceptual art has been made knowable through photography. Photography served to document pieces like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969), in which the artist released a succession of gaseous substances into the atmosphere; the medium also informed the very structure of projects such as Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), in which Piper took a picture in the mirror every day to assure herself of her existence during a summer of fasting and reading only Kant, yielding a serial representation of her changing body. If Conceptual art is… Full Review
January 16, 2013
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Elizabeth Edwards
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 360 pp.; 121 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780822351047)
Consult the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, edited by John Hannavy (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), and you will not find an entry on English record and survey photography, nor is the subject mentioned in the lengthy article on “survey photography.” But there is a biographical entry on Sir John Benjamin Stone, and it includes a curious editorial comment: “That Stone is not more celebrated should be a national shame, for he presented England with its history” (1351). Stone (1838–1914) was the founder of the National Photographic Record Association, one of dozens of British turn-of-the-century survey initiatives that… Full Review
January 16, 2013
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Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with Prestel, 2012. 264 pp.; 270 color ills.; 197 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791351940)
Exhibition schedule: Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, May 27–August 20, 2012; Haus der Kunst, Munich, October 12, 2012–January 20, 2013
Anyone who approaches Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), expecting to encounter the familiar collection of lush, awe-inspiring photographs of monumental Earthworks remotely situated in the American Southwest (concomitant with the usual array of drawings, models, and videos documenting these iconic projects) finds instead a hugely informative and compelling exhibition that considerably broadens her or his conception of this tendency that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized by Phillip Kaiser, MOCA's senior curator, who has since left Los Angeles to become director… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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Marcy J. Dinius
Material Texts.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 320 pp.; 44 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780812244045 )
Stuart Burrows
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. 304 pp. Paper $24.95 (9780820335216)
For two books on American photography and fiction, Marcy J. Dinius’s The Camera and the Press and Stuart Burrows’s A Familiar Strangeness could not be more different. The approach of The Camera and the Press is historical, with a concentration on the medium of daguerreotypy. Dinius draws on a rich variety of archival sources, including daguerreotype images, advertisements, and periodical literature, to illuminate the ways that the production, reception, and materiality of daguerreotypes affected their cultural significance. By contrast, A Familiar Strangeness considers photography generally as an expression of modernity—as a form of mass reproduction. Rather than examining a specific… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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John Elderfield, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. 504 pp.; 628 ills. Paper $55.00 (9780870707988)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012
Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning's life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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