Recently Published Reviews

In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have produced a timely book. It is neatly paradoxical. It worries about the “professionalization” of art history in research universities. Its principal readership, however, will be professional art historians in research universities. It protests pedagogical methodologism in art history—the reduction of theory to teachable methods, or “methodology.” But its own method of deconstructive close reading and rhetorical analysis is conspicuous. It has been widely legitimated as one way—maybe the best—to read good writing in the history and criticism of art, “theory” or not. These tensions are not fatal, however. They… Full Review

Contemporary Korean art has garnered a place in the narrative of Western contemporary art with Nam June Paik and Ufan Lee, who had retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and 2011, respectively. Although both were born in Korea, they left at a young age. Along with these two stars, the recent story of contemporary Korean art has focused on Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja, among others, who have likewise attracted attention at international art institutions and fairs in recent years. Generally excluded in the Western narrative are the talented young or established artists who live and… Full Review

Ingrid Vermeulen undertakes an important self-reflexive task in Picturing Art History: the examination of the transition from unillustrated to illustrated texts about art. Surprisingly, that transformation had little to do with technological changes. Using three specific publications as examples, she argues that eighteenth-century scholars increasingly came to conceive of the artistic past not as a series of biographies of artists, but rather as a seamless “chain” of artworks in which historical progress can, and indeed must, be seen to be fully understood. Vermeulen tracks her topic through four related questions: What types of images were considered appropriate to the… Full Review

Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar themes. Both privately and in public, painters and sculptors struggled to devise personifications appropriate to the representation of Resistance, Defense, and Defeat. Among the maquettes… Full Review

The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art has been many things to many people. Designed by Thomas Jeckyll as a dining room with leather walls and intricate shelving, and radically redecorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876–77, it originally grew around Whistler’s Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and showcased the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of Whistler’s London patron Frederick Leyland. In 1904 it was purchased by Charles Lang Freer and installed in a special wing of his Detroit home. By that point, Freer had already begun to envision the room in his future museum, and it has… Full Review

Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations focuses on the artists associated with the major figures of what the Anglo-Saxon world has called “French Theory,” conceived in a broad way, and corresponding mainly to the 1970s. The various chapters are confrontations between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Lapoujade or Leonardo Cremonini, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Rancillac, Louis Althusser and Lucio Fanti, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gérard Fromanger, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory, Jacques Derrida and Valerio Adami. The goal is to draw attention to these artists, far less known than the thinkers. The relationship then appears… Full Review

The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, published in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, follows those on Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall (2005), and Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humphrey (2008), while two forthcoming volumes will address Naples and Florence. The series is conceived as a broadly contextual account of art of all kinds in Italy, 1300–1600. The key to this approach is patronage. Each of the authors of Court Cities of Northern Italy looks at patrons as… Full Review

The exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan focuses on sculptural fragments from, and the subsequent digital reconstruction of, the Buddhist cave temple site of Xiangtangshan, located in Hebei Province in northern China. The inception of the site dates to the short-lived yet prolific Northern Qi Dynasty (550–577), the subject of the accompanying international conference held at the Freer Gallery on June 3–5, 2011. The name Xiangtangshan may be translated as “Mountain of Echoing Halls.” The name seems fitting, as the exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue examine the site as it reverberated during three distinct historical… Full Review

Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis was a delightful and instructive exhibition. In one ample room, divided by projecting vitrines and one partial transverse wall, they displayed paintings, drawings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, photographs, and even current wallpaper. Various forms of classical revival became widely acknowledged from the late 1870s onward as the best and truest American expression in architecture and domestic design. Albrecht and Mellins suggested that the catalyst was the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but they demonstrated that later expositions reinforced and developed ideas… Full Review

There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures. I am trying to engage students who are not necessarily art history or architecture majors and those who are in the class to satisfy some… Full Review

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many writers, such as the economist Stanley Jevons, viewed museums as agents of social reform, but today many scholars have focused on reforming museums and their collecting practices. Specifically, museums’ acquisitions of ancient objects have sparked contentious disputes about these institutions’ responsibilities. These debates are presented in Robin F. Rhodes’s The Acquisition and Exhibition of Classical Antiquities, an edited book of essays from a symposium held at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame on 24 February 2007. This work addresses the collection and display of licit… Full Review

Color—its optical properties, its physiological effects, its natural and human origins, its cultural and emotional associations—has been John Gage’s subject of choice for several decades, and no one has worked in this area more, or more fruitfully, than he. Gage’s most recent book is apparently narrower in scope but turns out to be more comprehensive in its claims than his Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Bulfinch, 1993) and Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Those earlier studies explored the symbolic and practical functions of color throughout… Full Review

David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to what one might expect, he argues, this emergent middle-class aesthetic had its origins not in the city but in the New England countryside—a claim he… Full Review

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite paintings are surely among the most entertaining images produced in Europe during the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century viewers respond to them immediately with delight and curiosity, and usually also remark on how much they are like Surrealist paintings. The same sorts of responses are found in art-historical scholarship. Renaissance studies has long neglected Arcimboldo altogether, with the result that his paintings remained to be effectively studied within their own context. In Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann seeks to rectify this lacuna in art-historical scholarship and to elucidate the deeper meaning… Full Review

Issues of high and low—fine art versus popular culture—ran rampant through Art in the Streets, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to exploring the history of graffiti and street art, it took any number of risks with regard to the challenges it posed to conventional notions of museum art. The exhibition succeeded in large measure and was at once raucous, thought provoking, and illuminating. Not surprisingly, it drew impressive crowds. At its best, the exhibition expanded definitions of art, revealing meaning and beauty in the most humble circumstances… Full Review