Recently Published Reviews

In recent years research and scholarship on limestone as a building material and its use in creating sculpture and decorative elements have taken a quantum leap with large-scale conservation, restoration, and scientific investigations of monuments in Europe. Working in Limestone: The Science, Technology and Art of Medieval Limestone Monuments, edited by Vibeke Olson, is an up-to-date study of medieval monuments and sculpture that focuses primarily on scientific studies in Northern France, England, and Ireland. In twelve papers by specialists, art history and the history of technology are integrated into a comprehensive overview that represents the fruits of sessions sponsored… Full Review

The year 2009 yielded a bumper crop of exhibitions about the art of the Japanese “samurai.” In addition to those documented in the three catalogues reviewed here, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, mounted The Samurai Re-Imagined: From Ukiyo-e to Anime, showing Edo-period woodblock prints alongside contemporary manga comics and anime cels and drawings (but issuing no catalogue). Although the latter catered wholly to popular culture, the other three were far more conventional. But their evident success was surely abetted by the general fascination with the mystique of the “samurai” that is perpetuated precisely by movies, the martial… Full Review

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) were astutely planned as complementary perspectives on the broad contexts for Gertrude Stein’s life and work. The most important aspect of these affiliated exhibitions is the copious interwoven personal, historical, biographical, and legendary stories of this unique literary icon, opening with the Stein family’s roots in the San Francisco Bay Area before shifting to the more expansive narrative of Gertrude’s life and that of her family, expatriates living in… Full Review

“In this book,” Laura Nasrallah writes at the beginning of her impressively erudite study, “I bring together literary texts and archaeological remains to help us to understand how religious discourse emerges not in some abstract zone, but in lived experiences and practices in the spaces of the world” (1). She explores within a deep context of Greek and Roman art and architecture what was at stake in second-century Christian self-representations. Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture is not a broad art-historical study; it focuses on a small number of Christian writers best known for their vitriolic addresses… Full Review

Egypt’s Alexandria was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, but because of the uneven preservation and excavation of its monuments, scholars have been reluctant to undertake a comprehensive study of its architecture. Judith McKenzie’s The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt: 300 BC to AD 700 is a great step in rectifying this, arguing that Alexandria’s importance as a center of architectural innovation cannot be overlooked. McKenzie credits the ancient city’s artisans with a wide variety of architectural and decorative innovations, leading to the creation of an Alexandrian style which spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East and… Full Review

Originally published in French in 2004 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Marta Madero’s study, Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law, offers a provocative glimpse into an important theoretical discourse on painting and writing, a premodern body of thought and argument that remains largely unknown to art historians. Working from medieval and early modern legal glosses and commentaries on the Digest and the Institutes (the code of civil law promulgated by the Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century), Madero’s book examines the tabula picta (painted panel) and its conceptual sibling, the case… Full Review

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s paintings have seduced, repelled, and baffled viewers since the early nineteenth century—sometimes producing all three effects simultaneously. But if Ingres’s work has provoked strong feelings in his viewers, as Susan Siegfried argues in Ingres: Painting Reimagined, it has elicited curiously dull critical interpretations. For many years, Ingres was treated either as a tediously conservative classicist or a simple-minded realist. Feminists reviled him for his treatment of the female figure—nudes polished out of anatomical existence or portraits weighed down with the reified finery of the bourgeoisie—and social historians of art avoided him because his work could not be… Full Review

James M. Dennis, professor emeritus of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of the “improbable” life of The Strike by Robert Koehler, one of the first American paintings to document the tensions between labor and management with detailed precision. “One of my aims in writing this book,” Dennis explains, “has been to provide a historic context to this discourse by restoring to contemporary awareness a quintessentially ‘socially engaged’ work of art produced more than 125 years ago—its origins, its admirers and detractors, its maltreatment, rediscovery, and ultimate transnational apotheosis” (6). Included in the series Studies in… Full Review

Judging by the number of books published in the last ten years or so with “frame” or “framing” in their title, to say nothing of those that include the terms “border,” “boundary,” or “margin,” the direction of scholarship is migrating toward the edges of the artwork. However, a fair number of these books are not about frames in the art-historical sense of the term at all. Leaving aside those clearly marginal to this review, such as house frames and the many histories of picture frames (often with their celebrated masterpieces blanked out), a vast number of studies use “framing” in… Full Review

Jane Mayo Roos’s beautifully illustrated new book, Auguste Rodin, surveys the key events of the sculptor’s career, focusing on his development as a professional sculptor, a journey that continued throughout his adult life. The thoughtful and well-conceived presentation delves into Rodin’s complicated family life and his cobbled-together education in the arts, and debunks some previously held myths about the sculptor. While it remains a challenge for any art historian to offer an original analysis of Rodin’s life and work, about which so much has been written, Roos covers familiar terrain with a fresh eye, and highlights aspects of his… Full Review

This ambitious book by Glenn Peers explores five case studies of framing. These frames delimit various aspects of Byzantine visual culture: pectoral crosses, manuscript illumination, church decoration, and icon revetments all figure here. “Frames” thus is not being used to signify the tidy border of an artwork, and not necessarily even a material or represented entity, but instead bespeaks a larger, conceptual paradigm. We have seen a wealth of studies in recent years looking at frames of both a literal and more notional sort, but less work in this vein has addressed the premodern era. Peers’s frames are heuristic devices… Full Review

If “the history of the modern artist is, in short, the story of artistic obsession,” as Paul Barolsky writes in A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso, then the author, whose long and distinguished scholarly career has focused on the artist and the early texts in which he has been represented, reveals a similar, and understandable, tendency. As Barolsky acknowledges, the book represents “a synthesis of a lifetime of thinking about the idea of the artist.” Here the idea of the artist retains its Eurocentric flavor, the expected result of the very historiography upon which Barolsky… Full Review

The last U.S. exhibition dedicated to the “three godless artists of Nuremberg”—Georg Pencz, Hans Sebald Beham, and Barthel Beham—was mounted by Stephen Goddard at the Spencer Museum of Art in 1988 as The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German Little Masters, 1500–1550; however, as its title indicated, that exhibition and its accompanying catalogue viewed these artists as “little masters,” both lesser followers of Albrecht Dürer and virtuoso miniaturist engravers. A delayed but opposite reaction, Grand Scale (by this reviewer with Elizabeth Wyckoff at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 2008), involved staging another aspect of these… Full Review

Cynthea J. Bogel’s book With a Single Glance is a page-turner. As dedicated as I am to the topic of premodern Japanese religion, it is not often that I stay up later than I intended, engrossed in the unfolding story. That was my experience of Bogel’s book. Yes, it is erudite and, yes, the plates are gorgeous, but most of all it is a fun read. The book is at the same time deep and breezy. Bogel aims to show that Kûkai, the great Buddhist saint, imported a new language of visuality to Japan. Some of this he brought… Full Review

Contributions to Anglophone scholarship in the past decade have included more than a handful of narratives focused on Mexico’s post-Revolutionary artistic movements. Moreover, photography’s place in the general art-historical account has come to redefine the terms of discussion around what served as that emerging nation’s particular forms of modernism. Histories of photography in Mexico have been intellectually indebted to the persuasive writerly performances associated with the late Carlos Monsiváis and Olivier Debroise. They have gained also from publications like Andrea Noble’s Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000) and subsequent pioneering work by Esther Gabara… Full Review