Recently Published Reviews

In her brilliant and lavishly illustrated new book on the history of wall painting in Europe from 1927 to 1957, Romy Golan’s subject is artworks specifically designed for architectural installation. Although there are several monographs about mural paintings by individual artists, or by groups of artists within a single national context, few historians have investigated how wall painting played out across many different countries during this period, and none have brought Golan’s innovative and rigorous brand of scholarship to the topic. Concentrating on France and Italy, but looking across to Spain, the United Kingdom, the Americas, and India, Golan’s study… Full Review

The New Museum’s exhibition Ostalgia represents one of the largest North American exhibitions of art from the areas of former Soviet influence, both in regional (countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union or Soviet satellites, as well as ones that did not fit into either of these categories) and historical breadth (1991 is the key moment, although included works span from the 1960s to the present). Drawing its title from a term adopted in Germany in the 1990s that came to refer to the fetishization of objects from everyday life in East Germany under Soviet influence (the term’s pun derives… Full Review

The disciplinary diversity of this conference, including contributions from scholars of art, archaeology, literature, history, and others, proved to be more than just a veneer. Organizers Andrew Marsham and Alain George (both from the University Edinburgh), together with fourteen other scholars, applied their wide-ranging expertise to various dimensions of the Umayyad period. The work of these scholars was divided into eight panels of two papers each: “Rulership in the Late Antique Context,” “Sacred Art,” “Christians and Muslims,” “Papyri and Social History,” “Historiography,” “Land Tenure and the Economy,” “The ‘Desert Castles,’” and “The Umayyads in Modern Times.” By and large, the… Full Review

Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from its founding in 1949 to his eclipse from power in 1971, is hardly a household name in art history. He rarely appears in art-history texts as much more than a background figure. At most, he is referenced as the head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]) and the man who built the East German state and its repressive bureaucratic apparatus. So it may come as some surprise for art historians, even those who specialize in postwar German art, to discover that Ulbricht played a fairly influential… Full Review

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a surprisingly varied display of the artist’s exploration in process, the body, objectness, and architecture. Divided among the museum’s two fourth-floor wings, the retrospective flows chronologically. The first wing showcases some of Serra’s early small sculptures, several films, the residue of a sculptural performance, and drawings. The curators have dedicated the second wing solely to his mature drawings. The central staircase that divides the two wings creates a slightly awkward flow, and I initially walked through the exhibition backwards and almost missed the first segment… Full Review

Along with David Summers’s Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon, 2003) (click here for review), Whitney Davis’s A General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades. It is unusually dense in logical argumentation, so it is more than a convention to say that it cannot helpfully be summarized. Because longer reviews will be needed to assess the book’s arguments, I want to use the generally shorter review length here in caa.reviews to raise two points about the… Full Review

Crowds gathered in Paris in the spring of 2011 to view an exhibition devoted to the Caillebotte brothers. Visitors enjoyed an opportunity to view famous works by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) such as The House Painters (1877), Interior, Woman Seated (1880), and Interior, Woman at the Window (1880), as well as numerous less-known canvases (mostly drawn from private collections). More surprisingly, the exhibition introduced the amateur photography of Martial Caillebotte (1853–1910), his unknown younger brother. Exhibited here for the first time, and only recently studied in their entirety, these photographs offered a fresh perspective on familiar scenes. Indeed, visual echoes could… Full Review

In the fields of architecture and urbanism there are few issues as pressing, or as vexing, as the suburban question. To the young, the cosmopolitan, and the ecologically minded, suburbia counts among our most egregious follies. Since at least the fifties, many have characterized suburbia as tacky, dull, and homogenizing, a position still taken by popular critics such as James Howard Kunstler. More recent anxieties about consumption—especially in connection with the body, racial inequality, and ecology—have generated new arguments that suburbia is environmentally unsustainable, terrible for our waistlines, and an impediment to social, economic, and racial justice. Yet,… Full Review

Painting Between the Lines was an exhibition of the work of fourteen contemporary painters that sought to remedy the sad fact that literature has fallen by the wayside insofar as providing subject matter for contemporary art is concerned. True enough, but the remedy proposed by the exhibition was somewhat problematic, although it did manage to successfully reframe ways that we habitually look at contemporary paintings by encouraging a slower and more considered engagement. Curator Jens Hoffman commissioned each artist to make a work that specifically responded to a passage in a novel that describes a fictional character’s reaction to a… Full Review

Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock and Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru offer important but very different contributions to the study of monuments—and more—in South America. One of the many achievements of Dean’s book is that it complicates any conventional description. She reckons with “pre-Hispanic Inka [her preference for the use of the Quechua language is significant] perspectives on stone, as they are articulated in and through the rocks themselves, as well as in Andean stories about stone” (1). While the author speaks of “Inka visuality,”… Full Review

Swati Chattopadhyay’s book, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny, and William Glover’s book, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City, share an interest in the development of a modern, urban city under British colonialism and shaped by local populations. Separated by more than a thousand miles, the subjects of these two books, Calcutta and Lahore, vary in terms of each city’s history, language, cultural features, and position in the British colonial empire. As both authors demonstrate, these cities were transformed by British colonial policies; however, shared colonial rhetoric and similar policies prompted different local… Full Review

An intimately scaled project at only eighty-eight pages of text interspersed with a number of illustrations, Peter H. Wood’s “Near Andersonville”: Winslow Homer’s Civil War is an immensely readable investigation of Winslow Homer’s 1865–66 painting of the same title. Wood introduces Near Andersonville—a modest oil on canvas depicting a monumental, black female figure standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn domestic structure and gazing solemnly out toward a line of Federal soldiers being led away by their Confederate captors—as one of Homer’s least-known paintings. Suggesting it also to be one of his more misunderstood, or, at least, underappreciated works… Full Review

The construction of a well-equipped museum building marks an important change in the cultural landscape of a city. Rarely on the map of major cultural destinations, the Tampa Bay area recently got not just one, but two, such additions, whose openings within less than a year created a momentous tectonic shift in the cultural scene. Built on comparable budgets and each located at a prominent waterfront site in its respective downtown, the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) and the Dalí in Saint Petersburg are not only welcome new facilities, but also significant architectural events for the fast-growing metropolis. That, however… Full Review

The Phillips Collection was recently given a David Smith sculpture, Bouquet of Concaves, and a gestural egg-ink drawing (both 1959). The lateral steel assemblage of irregular metal concave and convex shapes, set atop a slender pole, contrasts with the densely drawn web of staccato black strokes on white paper. Their differences reflect essential aspects of Smith’s yin-yang creative forces, poles vital to understanding the scope of his ambition and achievement. From these seeds, Susan Behrends Frank developed a small but richly textured exhibition using concave and convex forms as visual glue to relate diverse two- and three-dimensional works from… Full Review

As any serious student of the Middle Ages is well aware, an encounter with an illuminated manuscript can be both rewarding and confounding. The variety and complexity of material found within a single codex—or even on a single folio—can defy the expertise of even the most experienced scholar. The contours of current disciplinary guilds fail to encompass the range of interests, knowledge, and abilities of the makers and users of books in the Middle Ages. Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest centers on two folios that serve as a… Full Review