Recently Published Reviews

Transition periods in art history rarely present straightforward theses, and eighteenth-century South Asia is no exception. In the recent past this period was characterized more eloquently in terms of its failure rather than its success, as a cultural gulf stretching between waning Mughal power and an encroaching British one. Art historians have viewed this political crisis of the Mughal state as a corollary of an artistic crisis of style and composition—a primary concern being the dissolution of a unifying stylistic and cultural vision, the hallmark of the early modern Mughal atelier. Yet, as this book argues, when viewed from the… Full Review

Lloyd Laing’s survey of art in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland from the Iron Age to the conversion period opens with an introductory chapter entitled "The Study of Celtic Art." It then provides an overview in the following chapter, "Pre-Christian Insular Celtic Art," exploring both the motifs and the media of metalwork and examining interactions with the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, ending with a consideration of the Mote of Mark as a site of cultural interaction. Chapter 3, "The Impact of Christianity," looks at the structure of the Celtic church, the role of monasticism, and the development of Insular Christian iconography… Full Review

The tronie—a head or character study—is not a portrait; tronies figure the anonymous as opposed to the recognized, the pathos of expression rather than the portrait’s posed veneer. The tronie and its precise relation to the academic genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life has been the subject of recent scholarly attention. The slippery pictorial genre first appeared in the sixteenth century as a workshop exercise designed to teach young apprentices the fundamentals of drawing and chiaroscuro. A tronie may also mimic a particular master’s style; thus it became a popular and marketable form in the seventeenth… Full Review

Adam Kern's Manga from the Floating World analyzes the literary genre of kibyōshi (literally, "yellow covers"), providing a particular focus on the subversive effects these small, fully illustrated works of humor had on the ruling military bureaucracy in late eighteenth-century Japan. The book is rich in detail and written in a style that is engaging, informative, and entertaining. Kern has a penchant for taking standard phrases and morphing them into something ironic, as in his title for chapter 4, "The Rise and Pratfall of the Kibyōshi." A further distinctive feature is that the study follows what is now standard… Full Review

The Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference (CABC), organized by the CABC committee of art library professionals, was held free of charge and open to the public on September 30 and October 1, 2011, during Printed Matter’s sixth annual NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (http://nyartbookfair.com/conference). The conference consisted of six panel sessions lasting ninety minutes each, along with an hour-long lightning round of ten presenters discussing and showing images of their favorite zines, books, or multiples within a five-minute time frame. The well-attended sessions were held in a conference room on the first floor of the MoMA PS1… Full Review

Marcia Hall has written a brave book that is even more sweeping in scope than the list of names in the subtitle suggests. Indeed, the first half of the book discusses the Council of Trent, fifteenth-century Florentine religious painting, the Venetian use of oil paint, the Reformation, Leonardo, Giorgione, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mannerism, and Roman painting at the end of the century. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, however, is not a survey, but a lucid argument, focusing on a few examples over this broad swathe of Renaissance art in order to explore a question of signal… Full Review

“To the Romans I assign no limit of things nor of time. To them I have given empire without end” (Aeneid, 1.278). So Virgil’s Zeus prophesized to Aeneas, encapsulating the myth of Rome’s divinely sanctioned and immortal imperium (power, authority, and sovereignty) that inspired and was exploited by centuries of later rulers, popes, nobles, humanists, and others. Rome’s imperium—how it was expressed by its ancient ruins and fragments and who could possess it during the Renaissance—forms the central theme in Kathleen Wren Christian’s book. Christian examines the cultural phenomenon of antiquities collecting in Rome during the early… Full Review

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review

During the past decade, humanities scholars have brought increased attention to the cultural and affective practices that, along with political philosophies, legal policies, and social efforts to ameliorate suffering, comprise international human rights discourse. Given this challenge to the disciplinary dominance of the social sciences as well as broad media publicity surrounding atrocities in the twentieth century, it is notable that attention has been paid only recently to issues of visuality. New publications such as Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review) and Wendy Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights… Full Review

Few building types evoke more compelling insights into the relationship among architecture, nationalism, and modernity than the museum. Alice Tseng’s The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan is a thoughtful, nuanced book that illuminates how notions of national identity were shaped and reinforced through architectural form and aesthetic display in the new institution of the art museum in modern Japan. Tseng examines the development of the four national museums of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan as part of the larger story of the birth of the museum as a key institution of modernity. According to Tseng, these museums were “sites of constructed… Full Review

The “Exposures” series published by Reaktion Books highlights the relationship of photography to realms national, disciplinary, material, and metaphysical. Thus far the series includes books on photography and Australia, Japan, Italy, Ireland, the United States, archaeology, anthropology, literature, science, cinema, flight, spirit, and death. Although the topics suggest a refreshingly global approach to the history of photography, the two books under review here, Photography and Africa by Erin Haney and Photography and Egypt by Maria Golia, illuminate the Western bias of the series. The first title shoehorns all of Africa’s fifty-four plus nations (including Egypt) into one rather… Full Review

The need for an investigation of Auguste Rodin’s influence on American artists was spawned at the 2002 symposium, “New Studies on Rodin,” held on the occasion of the publication of Albert Elsen’s monumental catalogue of Stanford’s Rodin Collection. How did American artists adopt, adapt, or reject Rodin’s art? What were the attributes in their work that reflected the master’s oeuvre? Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center was the ideal place for this study, with the third largest Rodin collection in the world, including two hundred works—mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta--on view in three galleries and… Full Review

The frame, as object and concept, has attracted a fair amount of attention in recent years. Art historians, in particular, have explored the multiple (sometimes competing and conflicting) roles of the frame: its ability to draw attention to and away from the center; its capacity to open up or close in space; its efficacy as a visual or verbal sign; its status as a permanent or ornamental “supplement”; its formal and thematic relations to thresholds, such as windows and portals, to name but a few. Oleg Tarasov’s Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich engages all these aspects of… Full Review

In his latest book, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris writes with genuine gusto: “It is often said that seeing is believing. But we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around” (93). While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy. They attest to the… Full Review

In his preface to Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099–1291, Jaroslav Folda asserts that the story of the art of the Crusaders is far less well-known than their history: “To tell the story of Crusader Art adequately,” Folda writes, “a richly illustrated book is required” (11). This slim but sumptuously illustrated volume fulfills that requirement. It is, in many ways, an encapsulation of Folda’s scholarly oeuvre in that it presents a survey of the most significant works of art produced in the Holy Land between Crusader conquests of Jerusalem in 1099 and the… Full Review