Recently Published Reviews

These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review

Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of… Full Review

Since the early 1980s, there has been a small but steady stream of publications on the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of postcards. Some of the most academically rigorous discussions on postcards have dealt with themes of colonialism, tourism, and representations of cultural and racial otherness. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s edited volume Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1998) stand out as two notable examples. Other publications by collectors and historians in the 1980s and 1990s honed in on specific… Full Review

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the… Full Review

Sheila Dillon’s Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of Greek portraiture, but focuses on anonymous portraits that cannot be definitively associated with any historical individuals. Dillon neatly eschews vexing questions of specific identity, and the resulting volume is a compelling exploration of formal, theoretical, and contextual issues fundamental to the very genre of portraiture itself. In effect, Dillon disengages from previous preoccupations with individual identification and effectively rescues these mostly anonymous portraits from the general scholarly obscurity in which they have long languished. Dillon rigorously applies methodologies derived from … Full Review

This seminal exhibition, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before traveling to the National Gallery, London, was the first devoted to Jan Gossart in the United States and the first major monographic exhibition anywhere since 1965. The accompanying catalogue, which serves as a catalogue raisonné of the entire oeuvre, re-shapes the contours of this important early sixteenth-century artist and illuminates key questions about his working habits, patronage, and the themes and functions of his art. The exhaustive catalogue entries are prefaced by eight richly informative essays devoted to Gossart’s historical and cultural milieu, his work as an architectural… Full Review

The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in… Full Review

It is customary to think of European art between the First and Second World Wars in the plural—as defined by competing forms of abstraction, divergent realisms, and assorted returns to tradition. The principal goal of Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 was to assert an underlying unity to the period between the Armistice of 1918 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The chaos and mechanized destruction of World War I, the exhibition and its catalogue affirmed, generated a yearning for the timeless stability embodied by classical art. This provoked a widespread rejection of the formal innovations… Full Review

With the Culture of Diagram, John Bender and Michael Marrinan have written a complex and ambitious study examining the transformation of perception and cognition over the past two hundred and fifty years. How do we describe our world, they ask, and how has that process of description changed since the mid-eighteenth century? While Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, provides the starting point for their investigation, Bender and Marrinan examine subjects including the development of French history painting, theater design, linguistics, descriptive geometry, Cubist drawings, and quantum mechanics. This partial list of their dizzying… Full Review

The opening of the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, was one of the major—if not the major—museum events in the United States in 2010. Accompanied by a tidal wave of publicity at the regional and national levels, the new wing expands the museum’s previous display space by over one-third; it showcases art from both South and North America, offering a more expansive definition of “America” than has been standard in museum collections; and it includes works of art ranging from 500 BCE (an Olmec mask) to the twenty-first century (“By the… Full Review

Copious accolades and impressive numerical figures fed into the hype surrounding the opening, in November 2010, of the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. One can read in the mainstream media sensational descriptions of the elegant four-floor, 121,307-square-foot glass rectangle (designed by the London firm Foster + Partners) that houses the wing and many plaudits of its fifty-three galleries (which showcase over five thousand objects, more than double the number previously on view), nine period rooms, and four “Behind the Scenes” exhibits that explain the wing’s collecting and conservation practices. And one can… Full Review

The European tradition in the graphic arts began in the fifteenth century, and early prints are notable for a bold and rapid exploration of new subjects and themes. Given the much expanded degree of interaction between Christian Europeans and black Africans that developed during the 1400s, one might imagine that printmakers would have been eager to depict persons of color. Yet the first attempts to do so were halting, and for a paradoxical reason: graphic artists had a hard time showing dark skin because light and dark were rigorously employed as chiaroscuro elements to evoke form, rather than the hue… Full Review

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is a thoroughly researched biography of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and featured in the recently opened Art of the Americas wing. This canonical American painting portrays the four daughters of Sargent’s friends Edward (Ned) and Mary Louisa (Isa) Boit in the front hall of the family’s apartment in Paris. This book, presented as a biography, traces the life of the painting, from conception and production to exhibition and reception, and provides a detailed account of its… Full Review

Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy, an Italian edition of which was published in 2010, draws together the work of twenty-four recognized Italian scholars into an ambitious examination of the historical context and artistic production of the best-known courts across Italy from the end of the fourteenth century, a critical period of consolidation, to 1530, the year Charles V’s coronation in Bologna effectively rearranged the power structures across the peninsula. Although explorations of individual Italian courts such as those of Milan or Florence abound and have been followed by regional investigations, Courts and Courtly Arts provides a broader… Full Review

Walter Melion’s The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625, like the early modern works it studies, calls for a disciplined eye and close reading. Although the text is quite lengthy and includes numerous Latin references, it is neither dry nor tedious to read. Nonetheless, it is demanding. For readers willing to face the challenge, Melion’s book reveals the complexities and nuances of early modern visual piety in a fresh and powerful manner. Not only does it provide a new interpretation of prints seldom studied, it also encourages readers to examine artistic and devotional practices linked to… Full Review