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

Judith B. Hecker
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. 96 pp.; 72 color ills. Paper $29.95 (9780870707568)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 23–August 29, 2011
Lynne Cooney
Exh. cat. Boston and Balgowan, South Africa: Boston University School of Visual Arts and Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers, 2011. 100 pp.; 59 color ills. Paper $25.00 (0977720136)
Three Artists at the Caversham Press: Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge. Exhibition schedule: Boston University Art Gallery, February 8–March 27, 2011; South Africa: Artists, Prints, Community: Twenty-five Years at the Caversham Press. Exhibition schedule: 808 Gallery, Boston University, February 8–March 27, 2011
Two recent exhibitions, one in Boston and the other in New York City, highlighted the central role that printmaking has played in South African art for the past half century and provided an exciting introduction to its varied achievements. In South Africa, where art has frequently served as a vehicle for protesting political oppression, printmaking has been valued for producing multiples that can be widely disseminated by resistance organizations. In addition, in a country where the majority of the population has until recently been provided with a “bantu” education, certain processes, such as linocut, have provided an inexpensive vehicle for… Full Review
November 3, 2011
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Meredith Martin
Harvard Historical Studies, vol. 176.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 336 pp.; 82 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780674048997)
Among the most fanciful objects commissioned by the French monarchy is a pair of Sèvres porcelain pails designed for Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy at the Château de Rambouillet. They are shaped like tinettes—wooden buckets used on ordinary dairy farms for making fresh cheese—and painted with wood grain to imitate their rustic models. Like Marie-Antoinette’s mock hamlet at Trianon, the Rambouillet pails are outlandish inventions of the pastoral movement in literature and art, which celebrated naturalness with contrived theatricality. As the ill-fated monarch so cruelly experienced, bourgeois sensibilities soon lashed out at this noble ostentation. To pre-Revolutionary critics of the society… Full Review
November 3, 2011
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Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard, Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and Marco Iuliano
4 vols.. Copenhagen: Vandkunsten Publishers, 2009. 956 pp.; 828 ills. Cloth €300.00 (9788791393617)
Sumptuous in format and timely, given recent attention to European-Ottoman exchanges, the four volumes considered here benefit from Erik Fischer’s lifelong engagement with Melchior Lorck (also Lorichs), the scholarship of Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and a contribution by Marco Iuliano. Volume 1 consists of a complete survey of the artist’s oeuvre in the form of thumbnail images, a biographical essay, and documents. The second and third volumes consist of a facsimile of The Turkish Publication, published posthumously in 1626, and a catalogue raisonné, with woodcuts, engravings, drawings, and paintings generated from the artist’s sojourn in Istanbul… Full Review
November 3, 2011
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Elizabeth Siegel
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 216 pp.; 49 b/w ills. Paper $50.00 (9780300154061)
The title of Elizabeth Siegel’s Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums derives from an unsigned article, “Photomania,” published in Harper’s Weekly (February 16, 1861), and cited by Siegel as evidence of the popular appeal of the carte de visite album in the United States. As the article crowed, the album sold by savvy “makers of fancy goods” was allowing collectors of cartes de visite “to create their own ‘gallery of friendship and fame.’” The mania for albums was widespread, “making them ‘quite universal, and as fast as they are brought to us are taken… Full Review
October 21, 2011
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Desmond Shawe-Taylor
Exh. cat. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2009. 191 pp.; 157 color ills.; 14 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9781905686070)
Exhibition schedule: Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, March 27–September 20, 2008; Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, October 30, 2009–February 14, 2010
Sir Philip Sassoon organized the first exhibition of the English conversation piece in 1930. Describing this type of painting as “a representation of two or more persons in a state of dramatic or psychological relation to each other,” Sassoon displayed over 150 eighteenth-century pictures in his own house. Following Sassoon’s identification of the genre, books and exhibitions about the conversation piece appeared steadily between the 1930s and 1980s. More recently, studies on the emergence of the modern consumer society and the bourgeois public sphere have renewed interest in the picture type because of its depictions of fine material possessions and… Full Review
October 21, 2011
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Molly Emma Aitken
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 352 pp.; 65 color ills.; 173 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300142297)
“Why Rajput paintings look the way that they do” is the enormous concept that Molly Emma Aitken addresses in The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. Fortunately for readers entering into her innovative and complex thinking, Aitken is especially gifted in her word choice, graphically evocative, and the book is filled with well-reproduced images of stunning Rajput paintings. Her descriptions of the paintings and the artists who produced them give both the seasoned scholar and uninitiated reader a series of intriguing ideas to ponder. Aitken’s premise is concisely explained in her introduction: conventions used in Rajput painting… Full Review
October 21, 2011
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Marjorie Garber
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 272 pp.; 1 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (9781400830039)
The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level. It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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Cornelia H. Butler and Alexandra Schwartz, eds.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Many color ills.; Many b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780870707711)
Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna D’Souza, in considering MoMA’s feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a “site for community-building and for the utopian… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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David Kunzle, ed.
Trans David Kunzle Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 672 pp.; 376 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781578069460)
David Kunzle
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 224 pp.; 115 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9781578069484)
If Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) can be called the “Father of the Comic Strip,” then David Kunzle is surely its godfather, for it is to him that we owe the establishment of the comic strip as a subject for scholarship. His two-volume History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–90), today a collector’s item, is still unsurpassed as the basic text about this art form, and he has now published two additional books that also are destined to become basic reference works. The first, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, is a monograph on the artist… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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David Cast
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 272 pp.; 16 color ills.; 28 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780271034423)
If only Giorgio Vasari were as clear and straightforward as Nicolas Poussin. When the French theorist Paul Fréart de Chambray petitioned the artist for his definition of painting, Poussin replied: “It is an imitation made with lines and colors on some surface of everything that is seen under the sun, its end is delight (délectation)” (Lettres et propos sur l’art, Anthony Blunt, ed., Paris: Hermann, 1989, 174). Poussin’s response was deceptively simple, perhaps even coy in answering his somewhat pedantic interlocutor. Both doubtless understood delight to encompass, beyond sensual delectation, the goals of instruction and edification that had… Full Review
October 13, 2011
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Giovanni Curatola
Trans Jo-Ann Titmarsh New York: Abbeville Press, 2010. 280 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780789210821)
Over the last decades, historians of Seljuk and Ottoman art and architecture have paid increased attention to the ideological implications of their scholarship; many have worked hard to dispel Orientalist, nationalist, and various other outdated paradigms. Among these, one may count: the need to demonstrate artists and patrons’ Turkish ethnicity in the service of the image of a homogenous Turkish nation-state; the idea that one single genius-artist can represent a nation’s essence; the notion that after the “golden age” of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) experienced decline in all aspects of life; and the repulsion of outside influences… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Karsten Harries
Contributions to Phenomenology, vol. 57. . New York: Springer, 2009. 216 pp. Cloth $159.00 (9781402099885)
Karsten Harries’s commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opens with the interesting suggestion that the key to reading Heidegger’s influential essay is found in its epilogue. What makes the epilogue crucial for understanding the project’s underlying motivations is the manner in which Heidegger evokes Hegel’s famous pronouncement of the death of art. Harries encourages readers to understand “The Origin of the Work of Art” in view of Heidegger’s response to Hegel; in approaching the text this way, i.e., beginning from its end, an illuminating historical twist is given to Heidegger’s ontology. As Harries… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka, eds.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 318 pp.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780824830632)
Eclectic and challenging, What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context seeks to illuminate, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the relation between the functions and objectification of art made in Asia. The expansive intellectual foundations of the book began in discussion of a possible panel proposal for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, and were developed through calls for participation posted to online discussion forums. The result is a provocative book characterized by unusually diverse authors and topics. The specialist reader, accustomed to texts of more narrow chronological and geographical focus, might find the book daunting. Yet… Full Review
September 29, 2011
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Christine Göttler
Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation. Vol. 2. . Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010. 471 pp.; 25 color ills.; 156 b/w ills. Cloth €130.00 (9782503523972)
Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform by Christine Göttler is an important contribution to the study of Jesuit-sponsored visual culture in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. The artistic style associated with the Counter-Reformation (or the Catholic Reform), usually called the Baroque, was long linked to the Jesuits, so much so that it was dubbed “the Jesuit style” in nineteenth-century German and French art history as a pejorative reference to its propagandistic character. Göttler investigates this issue of control in her study, specifically the question of who is in control of the viewing… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Jean Wirth
Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2010. 416 pp.; 209 color ills. Paper $140.00 (9782600012317)
This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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