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

James Cahill
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 280 pp.; 105 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780520258570)
In James Cahill’s own words, the goal of Pictures for Use and Pleasure is to facilitate “further, deeper, and altogether better studies” of the proposed category of vernacular paintings (199). The interest is in finding, sorting, and identifying such paintings according to their subject areas; in making (corrective) attributions with suggested dates, artists’ names, and styles; and in offering interpretations with respect to function, aesthetic concern, and regional variation. The paintings studied were kept mostly in the private quarters of elite households, the inner and secondary palace complexes, and in urban places of pleasure frequented by male elite. Their artists… Full Review
January 10, 2013
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Richard J. A. Talbert
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 376 pp.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780521764803)
The field of Roman cartography has undergone a renaissance in recent years. This is due not only to the publication of books like The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Richard J. A. Talbert, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), but also to a fundamental shift in how scholars understand the function of Roman maps. For decades, scholars assumed that the Romans used maps much like we do, as navigational aids to facilitate travel and warfare. This assumption, however, has proven to be both anachronistic and inaccurate. Unlike modern people, the Romans rarely used maps for navigation, instead… Full Review
January 4, 2013
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Haim Steinbach
Paris: Three Star Books, 2009. 64 pp.; 61 color ills. Paper $225.00 (9782917622018)
Haim Steinbach’s latest artists’ book incorporates several of his sculptural themes into the codex form, exploring the choice and display of mass-market products and creating a dialectic between photobook and sculptural book. Object is a board book comprised of sixty-one color photographs featuring Steinbach’s signature found objects, mostly shot one per page, head-on, and silhouetted against a white background. Approximately the size and thickness of a stack of LP record albums, the book is made fully sculptural with rounded fore-edges and, most dramatically, a hole die-cut through the whole thing. This tension between book and sculpture constitutes the (empty) core… Full Review
January 4, 2013
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Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt, eds.
Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages.. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. 320 pp.; 100 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Paper $145.00 (9782503530444)
This collection of essays (eleven in English, three in French) contributed by fourteen scholars of art history and Christian liturgy from eight countries is focused on the development of altarpieces/retables in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as explored at a 2006 symposium in Gröningen, Germany. Findings are derived from physical remains and records of creation and use, and reveal affinities and diversities across scattered European sites, while providing bases for further study of a previously under-explored but prominent type of late medieval decoration. In their introduction, editors Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt emphasize the importance… Full Review
January 4, 2013
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Christian K. Kleinbub
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 224 pp.; 50 color ills.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271037042)
From Vasari’s epitome of “grazia” at the culmination of art’s third, most perfect era to Wölfflin’s paragon of the Classic style, Raphael’s paintings have exemplified definitive formal perfection. Their sacred subject matter seemed incidental to this aesthetic achievement, so completely does the expression of beauty subsume the mere articulation of devotional content. Christian Kleinbub, in his magisterial book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, thoroughly upends this outmoded view of the artist. He demonstrates how Raphael conceived his religious imagery, and especially visionary subjects, to mediate higher levels of spiritual contemplation. Kleinbub addresses the tension between the mimetic aims… Full Review
December 27, 2012
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Anna Contadini
Leiden: Brill, 2012. 224 pp.; 86 color ills.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $142.00 (9789004201002)
The focus of Anna Contadini’s A World of Beasts is the sole extant manuscript of the Kitāb Na‘t al-Ḥayawān (“Book of the Characteristics of Animals”), an Arabic treatise on the distinctive qualities of animals and their therapeutic value. Datable on stylistic grounds to ca. 1225 CE, “the Na‘t” was acquired by the British Museum in 1884 and is now held by the British Library under shelfmark Or. 2784. Contadini’s investigation exposes the manuscript as a unique witness to the convergence of Islamic illustrative traditions, pseudo-Aristotelian animal lore, and Greco-Arabic medical knowledge. In eight chapters and three appendices, she offers… Full Review
December 27, 2012
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Stephen C. Pinson
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 313 pp.; 36 color ills.; 103 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780226669113)
Stephen C. Pinson earned his PhD degree from Harvard University in 2002 with a dissertation on Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre that forms the nucleus of this book, nourished by over fifteen years of research and elaboration in several articles. Speculating Daguerre has been eagerly awaited; the last book-length study of Daguerre’s art, in any language, was Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, first published in 1956 and revised in 1968 (New York: Dover). As Pinson notes, the Gernsheims’ book was primarily biographical and documentary. Like several smaller publications, it relied heavily… Full Review
December 20, 2012
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Greg M. Thomas
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 240 pp.; 25 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300112856)
Greg M. Thomas’s comprehensive Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art intelligently expands upon ground recently covered by others in scholarly literature: images of French nineteenth-century childhood. The finest parts of the book are his discussions of works by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, about which he unearths new factual detail, and provides persuasive original readings of paintings both familiar and not. Drawing upon a wide socio-historical framework, Thomas analyzes images from the world of commodities associated with childhood, especially toys. His overarching thesis, that Impressionist images of childhood reveal the fundamental dilemma of the modern subject—“trying… Full Review
December 20, 2012
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Lynn Federle Orr and Stephen Calloway, eds.
Exh. cat. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2012. 288 pp.; 235 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781851776948)
Exhibition schedule: Victoria and Albert Museum, April 2–July 17, 2011; Musée d’Orsay, September 12, 2011–January 15, 2012; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, February 18–June 17, 2012
Guy Cogeval, Yves Badetz, Stephen Calloway, and Lynn Federle Orr
Exh. cat. Paris: Skira Flammarion and Musée d’Orsay, 2011. 224 pp.; 165 ills. Cloth €60.00 (97802081266643)
Exhibition schedule: Musée d’Orsay, September 12, 2011–January 15, 2012
The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with… Full Review
December 19, 2012
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Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols
Exh. cat. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2011. 112 pp.; 98 color ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780300169119)
Exhibition schedule: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, April 30—July 10, 2011
Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life was produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Art Institute of Chicago, which drew from the resources of that museum and other Chicago-area collections. The catalogue study is an important addition to the growing volume of literature that considers prints as functional, three-dimensional objects, rather than simply as flat images. The first footnote, in fact, offers a good overview of this specialized literature. The study’s primary author, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, completed her doctoral dissertation on similar material in 2006 (Yale University), Art—A User's Guide: Interactive and… Full Review
December 19, 2012
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Tanya Sheehan
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 216 pp.; 44 b/w ills. Cloth $74.95 (9780271037929)
The phrase “the medicine of photography” may very well draw a blank in the minds of even the most experienced photographic historians. Photography’s development through the latter half of the nineteenth century is not usually told in terms of medicine, but in terms of art, with the camera styled as a “solar pencil” able to match painting’s aesthetic capabilities. Yet in this highly original book, Tanya Sheehan showcases a vast, alternative narrative in which cameras were seen as scalpels, developing chemicals as therapeutic drugs (3), and photographers as “doctors of photography” (30) possessing the ability to inspect, diagnose, and rehabilitate… Full Review
December 19, 2012
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Peter Cornelius Claussen
Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte und christlichen Archäologie, Band 21 Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. 431 pp.; 255 b/w ills. Cloth €105.00 (9783515090735)
Peter Cornelius Claussen’s Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter 1050–1300 is a supplement to the author’s path-breaking book on Roman marble workers, Magistri doctissimi romani (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987). Magistri is the first volume of the ambitiously conceived Corpus Cosmatorum, the second volume of which is an alphabetically organized compendium of the “high medieval” churches in which the marble workers were active. The second volume has appeared to date in three parts: part 1, with entries on twenty-nine churches from S. Adriano to S. Francesca Romana (Stuttgart: Franz Streiner Verlag, 2002); part 3 (S. Giacomo alla Lungara to… Full Review
December 14, 2012
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Phillip Prodger
Exh. cat. London and Salem, MA: Merrell Publishers in association with Peabody Essex Museum, 2011. 160 pp.; 100 ills. Cloth $39.95 (9781858945576)
Exhibition schedule: Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, June 11–December 4, 2011; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, February 11–May 20, 2012; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor, July 14–October 14, 2012
Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition… Full Review
December 14, 2012
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John Goodall
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 480 pp.; 250 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300110586)
For nearly six hundred years castles lay at the heart of England’s social and political life. Whether located in cities or the country, along land frontiers or sea-bound shores, they served as strongholds, centers of government, residences, markers of social status, and political showpieces. Introduced at the Norman Conquest in 1066 (with more than five hundred constructed in the first decade after the Battle of Hastings), castles outlasted the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and succumbed only in the Civil War of the 1640s. Such longevity might be expected to ensure exhaustive coverage in the literature, but oddly this… Full Review
December 14, 2012
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Isabel Schulz, ed.
Exh. cat. Houston and New Haven: Menil Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 176 pp.; 129 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300166118)
Exhibition schedule: Menil Collection, Houston, October 22, 2010–January 30, 2011; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, March 26–June 26, 2011; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, August 3–November 27, 2011
Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at… Full Review
December 12, 2012
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