Recently Published Reviews

The discovery of the Book of Hours of Duchess Catherine of Cleves in the 1960s caused many art historians to change their views on fifteenth-century northern Netherlandish book illumination in a positive way. Instead of being regarded as a rather provincial school, Dutch book illumination was appreciated much more after the Cleves Hours had the chance to reveal her beauty to the world. The Book of Hours, made around 1440, has weathered the centuries in remarkable condition—missing only a few leaves—but was divided into two parts in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both parts miraculously found their way… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) offer opportunities to contemplate the changing face of Mexican art in relation to issues of nationalism and identity. With curatorial assistance at SDMA from Amy Galpin and Julia Marciari-Alexander, Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection presents eighty paintings from the first half of the twentieth century, complementing the San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection by including works by many of the same artists, such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Although the exhibition loosely situates these works within the context of… Full Review

Jenifer Neils’s lavishly illustrated new book aims to provide non-specialist readers with an introduction to the women of the ancient world as they are revealed through images and other artifacts held in the British Museum. The “ancient world” here is broadly defined, stretching from the Neolithic period to the late Roman empire and from Italy and northern Africa to modern Iran, although the discussion generally concentrates on the periods and regions for which there exists the best evidence. Neils does not pretend to cover her topic comprehensively; the evidence is too incomplete, and as she notes in the introduction, what… Full Review

In this pioneering study, Alison McQueen examines an important and yet largely overlooked phenomenon: the engagement with the visual arts of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. McQueen draws upon her extensive work in the archives throughout Europe and years of sustained consideration of this subject to argue that Eugénie’s patronage and collecting activities were distinctly political in nature, critical to the fashioning of her private and public personae, and central to the art world. A declared aim of this book is to challenge “the coherence of studies on art in nineteenth-century France” (5) by showing how Empress Eugénie’s involvement… Full Review

In the ancient world, gods were seen, the experience of their presence conceptualized in visual terms. In a departure from more traditional, philological treatments of religious phenomena, Verity Platt’s Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion highlights the visuality of epiphany. Engaging also with related cognitive and hermeneutic issues, she brings a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarly attention to the subject of epiphany in Graeco-Roman culture. In each of the book’s eight chapters, Platt places particular emphasis on viewing practices and their representation in images and texts. She explores how epiphany can… Full Review

Lisa Beaven has given us a hefty book with a twenty-one-word title (and subtitle), justifying its bulk and length with her broad reach and impressive research. Although partly a biography of Cardinal Camillo Massimo (1620–1677), this text goes beyond memoir by ably leading us across a wide discursive and geographic landscape. Camillo, of the Massimo family (one thinks immediately of Rome’s famous Palazzo Massimo, with its curved façade), found himself not always an adept player with and among Rome’s political elite. Remarkable glimpses of Massimo as a person of ambition and passion show up most vividly in an… Full Review

John R. Senseney’s The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture is a highly creative, discursive synthesis of an impressive range of thematic strands within classical architecture and philosophy. Senseney’s objective is to infer some possible theoretical bases for Greek architectural design procedures from the end of the fifth-century BCE to the first-century BCE, when the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote his Ten Books on Architecture with frequent reference to lost Greek texts. Senseney highlights developments in Greek philosophy, astronomy, and other fields that may have formed the basis of the… Full Review

The Matter Within, presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, is the first major survey in California dedicated to Indian art of the twentieth century. The show's title is, indeed, its own topic and conundrum. Eighteen artists, at various stages in their careers, are clustered under the umbrella term of “New Contemporary Art of India.” The criteria for artists included in this exhibition was dependent on their background as Indian and as artists whose works comment on the ever-changing Indian diaspora through video, photography, and sculpture. Some of the included… Full Review

The book Revolution as an Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective is a compelling first-person narrative by Mary Patten, one of the founding members of the radical art group Madam Binh Graphics Collective (MBGC) active in New York City from 1977–1983, and it makes a significant contribution to the history of feminist collectives and activist art practice more broadly. Patten does not limit her examination of MBGC to a diaristic account, however, but breaks the text into eleven brief parts, exploring the founding of the group, its philosophical and artistic sources, and concludes by considering… Full Review

Bracingly original, Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s study positions Stéphane Mallarmé as a poet of engagement, for whom the book represented a critical instrument for social change. Contesting twentieth-century theorists who shape-shifted Mallarmé into a hermetic aesthete or a nihilist subversive, Arnar situates him within nineteenth-century debates about print culture and readership, and she views his conception of the book as an active response to the crises of fin-de-siècle France. Plotting her study around the poet’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance), she approaches it from cross-linked historical and theoretical perspectives… Full Review

James H. Rubin’s newest book is a luxurious survey of Édouard Manet’s life and work, sumptuous in its three hundred color reproductions and lavish in its generous length of more than four hundred pages that allows the author to elaborate on his ideas about the artist. Intended for both the professional scholar and the non-specialist reader, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye traces the artist’s impact on his own generation and analyzes the variety of interpretations to which his art has been subjected up to the present day. Rubin decided not to focus exclusively on any one methodology, in order… Full Review

Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art is nothing if not ambitious. Winner of the College Art Association’s 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, it proposes no less than a reconfiguration of how we study the art of Italy from the first half of the sixteenth century. Italian High Renaissance art has certainly not been neglected in the discipline of art history, but Nagel opens his book with the observation that contesting “the centrality of the Renaissance in the history of art used to be a call arms. Now the battle is largely over” (1). Instead of seeking to recenter… Full Review

In 1972, Garry Neill Kennedy, then president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, wrote a short text for a themed issue of Studio International focused on “aspects of art education.” Kennedy’s one-page description of NSCAD is a dense block of type that lists, among other things, basic physical and historical facts about the college and Canada; the names of the college’s students, faculty, staff, visiting artists, and administrators; and details of its finances as well as exhibition and publishing programs. He includes a range of playful data points: the total weight of the student… Full Review

In 1863, Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt embarked on an expedition to California and the Pacific Northwest. Influenced by the photographs of Carleton Watkins and accompanied by the journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who chronicled the voyage for the New York Evening Post and the Atlantic Monthly, Bierstadt and his companion spent more than a month in the Yosemite Valley before traveling by steamboat, horseback, wagon, and rail into the new state of Oregon and through the Washington Territory. Seven years later, in his Manhattan studio, the artist produced a dramatic, large-scale painting of the western coastal scenery… Full Review

Francesca Woodman was three months shy of her twenty-third birthday when she took her own life in 1981, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) surprisingly extensive retrospective of her work, curated by Corey Keller, is haunted by this fact. One reason is the attention and acclaim that has been given to Scott Willis’s 2010 documentary titled The Woodmans, which chronicled the family romance of artistic competition surrounding Francesca’s short life and career, noting among many other things that she jumped to her death five days before her father George was to enjoy the opening of a… Full Review