Recently Published Reviews

The exhibition catalogue Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road celebrates a 2007 gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography to the J. Paul Getty Museum of more than eight hundred photographs by the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato. The gift tripled the size of the Getty’s Beato holdings, making it the world’s largest institutional collection of his photographs, which almost exclusively depict subjects in Asia and the Near East. The exhibition catalogue features 120 of these photographs, organized chronologically to showcase Beato’s long and productive career. Framing this work are informed and thoughtful commentary by Anne Lacoste, assistant curator… Full Review

Walter Gibson’s latest book investigates aspects of the relationship between word and image in early modern Netherlandish art. Although his subject is the depiction of proverbs, he does not dwell on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting in Berlin that depicts more than one hundred proverbs set in a human landscape. Rather, he discusses the general phenomenon of the reliance on proverbs in Netherlandish culture, charting the rise of proverb books and the use of proverbs in several literary genres. Gibson then introduces a series of case studies, some drawn from earlier publications but revised for this venue. The… Full Review

With Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch adds her distinct voice to the vast literature locating a critical epistemic shift in Europe ca. 1500. That she chooses the words “early modern” for her title is certainly deliberate in viewing this period as one of nascent modernity in its self-consciousness, broadening awareness of cultural relativity, use of the printing press, and emphasis on empirical observation (whether actual or feigned) for truth-claims. Leitch’s great contribution begins with the observation that although early modern Germany at the turn of the sixteenth century was not among the first European powers to… Full Review

Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 is an extraordinary book: highly interpretive and synthetic, sprawling in the breadth of visual culture it surveys, yet very readable and entertaining. Those familiar with Marrinan’s previous publications might expect an emphasis on Romantic painting, and there is plenty of that; but this book integrates painting and the pictorial arts into a sweeping narrative that includes museums, collecting, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, artisanal and industrial objects, dioramas, arcades, and more. It relates visual culture to politics, memory, emerging forms of public and private life, and new modes of commerce, industrial… Full Review

Paul Crowther’s Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics. The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history. Crowther’s approach might be called the “phenomenological depth theory” in so far as “depth” is a word with which he appears fascinated. The main theoretical issues are addressed in the second chapter, whereas the first turns present-day art history into two phantom camps—the one defined as “reductionist” as against the other, Crowther’s, which focuses on a… Full Review

The attractive exhibition catalogue under review here shines a bright light on the rich and diverse collection of Egyptian art that is the Myers Collection at Eton College in Windsor, UK, with the added benefit of a chapter featuring coins and other post-pharaonic artifacts from the University of Birmingham. It is not only a welcome addition to previous publications of artifacts from the Myers Collection (e.g., Stephen Spurr, Nicholas Reeves, and Stephen Quirke, Egyptian Art at Eton College: Selections from the Myers Museum, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), but also a prime example of the kind of… Full Review

This impressive, generously illustrated collection of essays edited by Claire Farago developed from a symposium held in London in 2001 that focused on the historical reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura. Twenty-three studies, including introductory remarks and an annotated bibliography, by twenty authors (three scholars make multiple contributions) examine the transnational fortune of the treatise and consider Leonardo’s influence on the institutionalization of artistic production in early modern Europe. The focus on reception leads to consideration of fundamental issues regarding Leonardo’s legacy, such as the development of the modern conception of artistic genius, as well as broader… Full Review

Jacob Lawrence is best known for his multi-panel series The Migration of the Negro (1940–41), with the Philips Collection in Washington, DC, owning the odd-numbered panels, and the Museum of Modern Art, the even-numbered ones. In November 1941, Fortune magazine published twenty-six of the works, and in December of the same year Edith Halpert showed the entire series at her Downtown Gallery. With this exposure, Lawrence became, at the age of twenty-four, a nationally recognized artist. The sixty small paintings that document the wave of black migrants from the rural South to the urban North have been widely reproduced and… Full Review

Monumental color woodcuts were the most striking feature of the work of Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) displayed in a single large, light-filled room at the Delaware Art Museum. Although Baskin thought of himself primarily as a sculptor, the only freestanding sculpture included was Lazarus (1960), and his legacy will rest on the superb craftsmanship and expressionist power of his relief prints and letterpress books. The solo show was comprised of the seventy-six works created between1952 and 1974 that Alfred Appel, Jr. (1934–2009) collected during the 1960s and gave to the museum in 2009. In her “Director’s Statement” in the catalogue,… Full Review

Sequestered in the darkness of storage more often than not, a consequence of the friability of the light-sensitive, powdery medium, pastels are rarely exhibited on a regular basis by museums. It was an unusual and welcome happening, then, when the Musée d’Orsay staged in the fall of 2009 what must have been a visually sumptuous installation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pastels drawn from its unparalleled permanent collection. The project was initiated by Serge Lemoine, the outgoing former director of the Musée d’Orsay, and seen to completion under the direction of his successor, Guy Cogéval. It was accompanied by a… Full Review

Burial Assemblages of Dynasty 21–25 is an impressive, comprehensive work dealing with the development of funerary customs in the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1100–650 BCE), one of the most misunderstood time periods in ancient Egyptian history. The work precedes the founding of “TiMe, Transformation in the Mediterranean: 1200–500 BC,” an international study group, and is incorporated into the Austrian Academy of Sciences’s series Contributions to the Chronology of the Eastern Mediterranean. The major focus of this book, a reworking of David A. Aston’s doctoral dissertation awarded in 1987 from the University of Birmingham, is the analysis of the… Full Review

Susan Sidlauskas’s fascinating, well-researched, and important new book, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, analyzes nearly thirty paintings Paul Cézanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, between 1883 and 1894. In this ambitious undertaking, Sidlauskas advances new and provocative perspectives on Cézanne and his art. Crucial is Sidlauskas’s presentation of a Fiquet Cézanne distinct from the historical image of the uncooperative spouse (the counter-muse), a largely misogynist view that has dominated the Cézanne literature for more than a century. Sidlauskas draws on an impressive array of sources and methodologies, ranging from nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific texts through the… Full Review

Refracted Visions is a substantial and well-researched study of contemporary popular photography in Indonesia, a result of anthropologist Karen Strassler’s extensive fieldwork in Java since the mid-1990s, which covers a period when analog photography was still dominant. While the book provides adequate historical background into the consolidation of popular photography since the colonial era, its focus is on six genres, each given a separate chapter treatment: amateur photography (chapter 1), studio portraiture (chapter 2), identity photographs (chapter 3), family ritual photography (chapter 4), student photographs of demonstrations (chapter 5), and photographs of charismatic political leaders (chapter 6). Strassler draws from… Full Review

If the observation that modern conceptions of homosexuality were deeply interwoven with the forms and experiences of the modern city is now a commonplace, queer London has emerged as a privileged site of analysis. Cultural and social historians have mapped its contours in impressive detail, drawing on the extensive police documentation of sodomy arrests from the late nineteenth century onward, the numerous high-profile court cases inaugurated by the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde, and the popular press’s apparently unlimited appetite for sexual scandal. The latest contribution to this textured historiography is The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar… Full Review

A brainchild of former Getty Museum Director Michael Brand and scheduled to commemorate the bicentennial of Mexican independence from Spain, The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire was the most ambitious exhibition undertaken by the Getty Villa since its reopening in 2006. A “museum and educational center dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria” (according to its website), the Getty’s Roman-style villa proved a provocative and unexpectedly resonant site for the presentation of Aztec culture. One of the goals of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) was to loot this rich… Full Review