Recently Published Reviews

What conceptual, political, and artistic foundation stood behind Tony Conrad’s decision in 1965 to create The Flicker, an enervating, even mind-altering, real-time visual experience which would both contest and manifest a newly configured regime of power presiding over the contemporary subject? This is the question, and, in a sense, the pretext for Branden W. Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, a thoroughgoing revision of the artistic terrain of the 1960s and its historicization. Joseph’s sub-subtitle, “(A ‘Minor’ History),” itself bracketed and internally qualified with quotation marks, points to the author’s means: meticulous… Full Review

Liz Wells is best known for editing two of the most frequently used anthologies in courses devoted to the history and practice of photography: The Photography Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2009). She is also a coeditor of the journal Photographies, launched in 2008, and has curated several exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography. Her first monographic publication, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity collects six of Wells’s essays on photography’s intersection with landscape as both representation and lived experience. Land Matters draws upon a lengthy catalogue of previous… Full Review

Eager to ascertain the pure motives of and exact origins for modernism, early twentieth-century architectural scholarship left behind the untenable notion of architecture’s absolute departure from historic ideals as its practitioners moved resolutely toward a functionalist aesthetic. Historians of the past decade have attempted to correct such a narrow perspective by broadening their inquiry into the roots of modernism. Their expansion of the field of analysis to include nineteenth-century intellectual and visual culture as a whole has allowed modern architecture to emerge as a rich and complex phenomenon that transcended mere material and technical considerations. Lauren S. Weingarden’s… Full Review

There are rare instances in which portraiture succeeds in conveying not only an individual’s personality, but also something greater, something like what John M. Rosenfield calls “the immediacy of life itself” (11). The striking portrait sculpture of the Japanese monk Shunjōbō Chōgen on the cover of Rosenfield’s Portraits of Chōgen: The Transformation of Buddhist Art in Early Medieval Japan meets these lofty standards. Produced around the time of its subject’s death in 1206, the work embodies the artistic transformation in Japan occurring over the last decades of the twelfth century and into the early thirteenth century, when the otherworldly idealism… Full Review

In Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola’s Seasons of Desire, Anthony Colantuono examines erotic images of seminal importance to Renaissance iconography and sensibility. His investigations encompass a wide-ranging spectrum of literary and artistic sources concerned with mythology, medicine, witchcraft, and astrology, many of which have not been previously explored in this context. The book’s basic premise is that the theme of Mario Equicola’s program for the Camerino d'Alabastro, commissioned by Duke Alfonso d'Este in 1511, and of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), Equicola's source of inspiration according to Colantuono, is the neo-Aristotelian theory of the… Full Review

The collages of Kurt Schwitters—layered arrays of newsprint, packaging labels, advertisement fragments, train schedules, ticket stubs, envelopes, receipts, and even candy wrappers, all tacked down and anchored by expressionist paint—are surprisingly prescient for the postwar period, even proleptic. Although produced between 1918 and 1947, they nonetheless register a communications environment familiar to the second half of the twentieth century; their readymade accumulations of word and image suggest a relentless media barrage and advertising assault, a constant flow of data and information. Schwitters called these collage works “Merz”—a neologism he coined from the second syllable of the German word Kommerz… Full Review

The opening sentence of this lavishly produced book authoritatively announces that it intends to look at the one hundred and eighty or so surviving churches that were built in Ireland between the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century and the early stages of the Romanesque period—around 1100. As Tomás Ó Carragáin points out in his introduction, which is really a brief historiography of the subject, scholars have previously relied on the pivotal publications by George Petrie, the Earl of Dunraven, Arthur Charles Champneys, and Harold G. Leask.[1] Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual and Memory is a welcome… Full Review

The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada is an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship on the social history of photography in Canada and, more broadly, to methodological and conceptual issues involved in researching photography. Editors Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard have produced a volume that is essential reading for scholars, curators, archivists, artists, and photographers studying the role of photography in the changing topography of national identity. The contributors examine collections of photographs in Canadian archives and galleries that have contributed to the visual legacies of Canada’s past and continue to shape the country’s “imagined geography” (a concept from Edward… Full Review

In the eleven essays contained within The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, scholars address a longstanding issue in cultural history and the arts—the perception of different cultures in the Mediterranean and the representation of their peoples by Europeans in the early modern period. Early modern Westerners displayed difficulty in categorizing their non-European neighbors, as artists who traveled, as well as those who incorporated non-Westerners into their imagery at home, were influenced not only by the visual sources on which they based their compositions, but also by propagandistic literature, the geopolitics of their… Full Review

In Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center, Joyce M. Szabo traces the unique patronage of collector Eva Scott Muse Fényes (1849–1930) during her visits to the military prison at Fort Marion, Florida. This book and its unique focus are the legacy of a scholar who for decades has specialized in studying and publishing on the topic of Native American ledger art and other related visual topics. Szabo is also well known for curating several exhibitions on such work. Specifically, Szabo offers a glimpse into ledger art that… Full Review

The Walter De Maria: Trilogies exhibition at the Menil Collection is a sparse, elegant, and highly controlled experience. Despite this, the show manages to play nimbly with the essential premise of a retrospective, offering three series of new works that are each complete on their own, but reprise and revise older pieces, just as the Menil mines its own institutional legacy.[1] The exhibition begins in the museum’s foyer, where viewers are surrounded by three large monochromatic canvases—one yellow, one red, one blue—that articulate the De Stijl ideal of the integration of painting and architecture to construct a utopian… Full Review

The nude body—simultaneously manifest as classical ideal, titillating form, creative source, and condemned subject—is so central to the history of Renaissance and Baroque art that any study devoted to the topic at large risks the pitfalls of generalization. One way to avoid this snare is to focus more narrowly on the oeuvre of a single artist, a specific theme (like the representation of Christ’s body), or even a seminal individual example such as Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve panels from the Ghent Altarpiece (1424–35). Another option is to localize the reception of the nude within a certain geographical region… Full Review

Almost seventy years after World War II, amateur photographs and films about Nazis, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust remain a continued source of popular fascination. In 2008, for instance, The New Yorker published a feature story on a newly discovered photo album that once belonged to Karl Höcker, the adjutant to Richard Baer, the commandant of the Auschwitz I camp. The album shows SS men and women auxiliaries enjoying free time in the summer of 1944, precisely as the factory of death reached the peak of its murderous efficiency. To its creator, these snapshots represented fond memories of sunny… Full Review

Over the last decade there has been a quiet but persistent revolution in scholarship on photography. The growing popularity of the medium as a focus of academic study, coupled with the desire by some researchers to explore histories of photography beyond the mainstream, has seen a groundswell of work being undertaken in regions outside of the United States and Europe. Pushing beyond the limited and generally imperialistic boundaries still apparent in most world histories of photography, Australasian photo-historians are actively contributing to a more global understanding of the medium. This is most evident in Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf’s notable… Full Review

The thirty-seven alabaster figures—most of them roughly sixteen inches tall—that visited the superbly expanded and renovated Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this spring have now completed their second of three years on the road. Having never before been seen as a complete grouping outside of France, in early 2010 the sculptures left Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts for a seven-stop American tour that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concluded in Richmond. From there they have proceeded to Bruges and now Berlin, two cities added after their voyage began. Organized by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME) and… Full Review