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

Charlotte Yeldham
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 230 pp.; 73 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9780754669913)
In her short biographical work Father and Daughter: Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury (London: Epworth, 1952), Ruth Young, a descendant of Maria Spilsbury (Spilsbury-Taylor, after her marriage in 1808), recounts a delightful anecdote in which the future King George IV visited Spilsbury’s studio on St. George’s Row, London. Impatient with how slowly work was progressing on his commission which, to his judgment, seemed complete, he exclaimed, “Really, Mrs. Taylor, I swear that you can do no more to that! You’ve finished it and a damned good picture it is.” Unconvinced, Spilsbury sought a second opinion from her maid. Upon close inspection… Full Review
March 22, 2012
Thumbnail
Heather Hyde Minor
Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, vol. 6.. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 312 pp.; 36 color ills.; 112 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780271035642)
The most famous works of eighteenth-century Roman architecture and urbanism, such as the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps, have always seemed more at home at the end of histories of Baroque architecture than at the start of histories of modern architecture; there, one is more likely to encounter Laugier's hut or Soufflot's Sainte-Geneviève. The idea that the architectural initiative passed from Rome to the north sometime around 1700 extends back to the eighteenth century itself, and was rarely questioned in the century-long tradition of formalist architectural history inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. But while eighteenth-century Rome has had… Full Review
March 22, 2012
Thumbnail
Pia Brancaccio
Brill's Indological Library, vol. 34.. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 332 pp.; 64 ills. Cloth $154.00 (9789004185258)
The title of this superb volume does not fully prepare the reader for its broad scope of relevance well beyond the site of Aurangabad for an understanding of Indian art, religious communities, and socio-economic history spanning eight hundred years from the first century BCE to the seventh century CE. One would expect from the title a focused monograph on the sculptures carved at the cave temples at Aurangabad in India’s Western Deccan, in the present-day state of Maharashtra, dating primarily to the sixth century. Pia Brancaccio not only provides a much-needed focused study, but she also follows the ramifications of… Full Review
March 14, 2012
Thumbnail
Carol S. Eliel, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Prestel, 2011. 176 pp.; 90 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9783791351216)
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, April 3–June 24, 2011; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 6, 2011–January 8, 2012; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, January 28–April 15, 2012
David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy is the first major presentation of Smith’s work on the West Coast since the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) own memorial exhibition held in 1965, which consisted of a dozen works from the Cubi series and two Zigs, all executed in the last years of his life, from 1961 to 1965. The present exhibition seeks to set these late works in context by demonstrating that Smith’s use of geometric form in these sculptures did not represent a departure for the artist, as has often been claimed, but was the culmination of a… Full Review
March 14, 2012
Thumbnail
Maureen Murphy
Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2009. 400 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Paper €26.00 (9782840662952)
De l’imaginaire au musée: Les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931–2006) considers the political and ideological contexts that shaped institutional display of the arts of Africa since the 1930s. Based on Maureen Murphy’s 2005 dissertation, the framework of this engaging study is the parallel but distinctive evolution of French and U.S. museums’ presentation of African artifacts as ethnographic objects or as works of art. Following a loose chronology, Murphy carefully unpacks the “imaginary” perception of Africa through its treatment in literature, popular imagery, and exhibitions. In the introduction, Murphy distances herself from an art history… Full Review
March 14, 2012
Thumbnail
Suzanne Gott and Kristyne Loughran, eds.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 248 pp.; 71 color ills. Paper $27.95 (9780253222565)
Malian designer and artist Kandioura Coulibaly “interpret[s] the stories that are told by the material culture” (106) he uses in his costumes and jewelry. In Janet Goldner’s conversation with Coulibaly, entitled “Using the Past to Sculpt the Costume of the Future: An Interview with Kandioura Coulibaly” and collected in Contemporary African Fashion, readers discover how his work—and his aim to construct a museum of fashion—emerges from a process of reconstructing and recovering a hidden history, one often overlooked in accounts of Africa’s complicated chronology. Seeing fashion as an organizing system, he describes how it is woven from the physical… Full Review
March 8, 2012
Thumbnail
Exhibition schedule: Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, March 10–July 3, 2011
Robert Smithson (1938–1973) once remarked, “I’m not a reductive artist, I’m a generative artist” (Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” in Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 88). The Smithson Effect, an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts exploring Smithson’s afterlife in the work of other artists since the 1990s, proves that his generative quality exceeded even his own lifetime. With The Smithson Effect, curator Jill Dawsey brings together twenty-two contemporary artists whose work either appropriates Smithson’s or explores his central concepts in new directions. This visually arresting… Full Review
March 8, 2012
Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, ed.
Paris: Nolin, 2011. 218 pp.; 32 b/w ills. Paper €62.00 (9782910487416)
This book is a collection of nine essays and a short preface analyzing some aspects of the connections between Philippe de Champaigne, the convent of Port-Royal, and Jansenism. The editor, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, contributed two essays; the last one (“La Foi et les œuvres. Postface sur l’œuvre peint de Philippe de Champaigne et ses possibles liens avec la spiritualité de Port-Royal”) functions as a postscript. It provides a useful context for the collection by summarizing the literature and explaining the approaches scholars have used (in the past and here) while proposing Cojannot-Le Blanc’s own interpretation, to which I will return… Full Review
March 8, 2012
Thumbnail
Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas, eds.
Hanover, NH and Lebanon, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College and University Press of New England, 2010. 294 pp.; 116 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9781584658177)
Assyrian relief sculpture forms well-known parts of the collections of several major art museums. Lesser known, perhaps, is the fact that many smaller institutions can also boast of collections of these antiquities. Unfortunately, the sculpture at these smaller museums has not often been fully researched or even adequately published. Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography goes a considerable way toward remedying this situation with respect to the materials from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In addition to dozens of large, high-quality color photographs of the Hood's sculpture, Assyrian Reliefs also includes nine… Full Review
February 23, 2012
Thumbnail
Paolo Morello
Rome: Contrasto, 2010. 832 pp.; 221 ills. Cloth €120.00 (9788869652196)
Maria Antonella Pelizzari
Exposures. Edited by Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton.. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. 192 pp.; 94 color ills.; 32 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781861897695)
Writing in the 1930s, Italian artist, writer, and musician Alberto Savinio described the invention of photography as “a moment of transformation in the history of humanity that in some ways surpasses the conquest of Constantinople and the discovery of America” (quoted in Diego Mormorio, Una invenzione fatale, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985, 13). Although Savinio comes close, it is hard to overstate the importance of the ways in which photography offered entirely new ways of seeing the world to an unprecedented number of people. The new medium’s cultural impact in Italy was profound, and the country (unified only in 1860 and… Full Review
February 23, 2012
Thumbnail
Paul Barolsky
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 168 pp. Cloth $24.95 (9780271036762)
In this tiny volume Paul Barolsky seeks to demonstrate the “powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist” (ix). Although modern art-historical scholarship has, since its inception in the nineteenth century, emulated the scientific method (in order to establish its legitimacy as an academic practice), Barolsky finds fault with the consistent use of this approach when dealing with many of the primary sources that serve as the basis for evidence. He contends that, in the past, imaginative literature contributed greatly to the history of art and that scholars have often taken it at… Full Review
February 23, 2012
Thumbnail
Emanuel Klinkenberg
Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. 310 pp.; 127 b/w ills. Paper $128.00 (9782503528359)
The image of a donor holding an architectural model is a familiar feature in medieval art, and yet it is a deceptively challenging subject for comprehensive study. While there are many preserved examples in a variety of media spanning the entire Middle Ages, there are also many documented, but now lost, examples for which both the date and compositional elements are often questionable. In short, the record is far from complete. Even among the extant representations, the ways in which the buildings are depicted range widely, both in terms of viewpoints (i.e., from the side, front, or back) and of… Full Review
February 16, 2012
Thumbnail
Christopher P. Heuer
The Classical Tradition in Architecture.. New York: Routledge, 2009. 312 pp. Cloth $100.00 (9780415433068)
The sixteenth-century painter, architect, and print designer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526–1609) has not been ignored by recent art history. Two exhibitions—in Antwerp and Schloss Brake—in 2002, an international symposium in 2004, with catalogues, proceedings, and other publications and detailed studies of parts of his oeuvre, edited by Heiner Borggrefe, Piet Lombaerde, and others, have secured the artist’s firm position in the current view of northern Renaissance art history. Christopher P. Heuer’s The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, is the first book-length… Full Review
February 16, 2012
Thumbnail
Sonya S. Lee
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. 372 pp.; 145 ills. Cloth $55.00 (9789622091252)
Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture by Sonya S. Lee is the first book-length study of the nirvana image in Chinese art, examining carefully chosen works from the sixth to twelfth centuries. In her exploration of this motif, which represents the final extinction of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, Lee’s methodological approach mediates the interactions between the monastic community, lay patrons, and artisans in articulating the particular resonance that this motif had in China, where it materialized in a broader range of architectural, material, and visual forms than had been the case in South and Central Asia… Full Review
February 16, 2012
Thumbnail
Wu Hung
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. 272 pp.; 35 color ills.; 165 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780824834265)
In texts and poetry of ancient China, the Yellow Springs refers to the subterranean realm of the dead and was thus “the imagined location of innumerable graves” (7). Wu Hung’s Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs presents a long-awaited synthesis of developments in tomb art in China from the Neolithic period through the Song Dynasty, or the third millennium BCE though the fourteenth century (and in some instances, even into the succeeding Ming and Qing dynasties). Such broad, sweeping studies are rarely attempted, but the core of this book is in fact a compilation of some three decades… Full Review
February 16, 2012
Thumbnail