Recently Published Reviews

Juliet Koss's Modernism after Wagner is a groundbreaking addition to studies in the history and theory of artistic modernism. Her work traces the fortunes of Richard Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), beginning with his writings in the late 1840s. Throughout her book, Koss explores the various understandings and misunderstandings that continue to dog Wagner's legacy to the present day. Assailed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century and later embraced by Adolf Hitler, Wagner and his dream of a total work of art were dealt a series of critical blows. Most devastating were those delivered… Full Review

Baroque 09 was a yearlong series of cultural events in the United Kingdom that celebrated the era’s art, music and culture. The Victoria and Albert Museum participated with the well-received exhibition, Baroque 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence, which ran from April 4 to July 19, 2009. Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn’s volume of the same name serves as the catalogue for the exhibition. The book is more than this, however, as the catalogue itself comprises only twenty-eight pages located toward the back of the book. The preceding three hundred pages attempt to reconstruct the Baroque and present… Full Review

On January 23, 1710, a royal proclamation written by Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670–1733), announced the formation of a new porcelain manufactory established under his patronage within the walls of the Albrechtsburg Castle in the town of Meissen located a short distance from the Saxon capital city of Dresden. The proclamation heralded the discovery by the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682–1719) of a formula for high-fired porcelain of a type commonly known as hard paste that had been developed in China centuries earlier and that was coveted throughout Europe from the time of its arrival… Full Review

The Derveni Krater by Beryl Barr-Sharrar brings together many diverse elements related to this spectacular metal vessel. This is not the first scholarly monograph about the krater. It was the subject of a dissertation that appeared in 1978 by Eugenia Giouri for the University of Thessaloniki, and Barr-Sharrar gives credit to Giouri’s pioneering work. Barr-Sharrar’s volume is, however, the first in-depth study of the Derveni Krater that is easily available to readers outside of Greece. Filled with super illustrations, it includes information that has come to light since 1978 from numerous sources, including her own papers and publications. She knows… Full Review

In Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, Fernand Braudel claimed that, “The history of costume is less anecdotal than would appear. It touches on every issue” (Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 226). The innovative catalogue and exhibition On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto take Braudel’s focus on costume as a point of departure to investigate how footwear provided a significant perspective onto social, economic, and cultural conventions around the early modern Mediterranean. The bulk of the… Full Review

This beautifully illustrated catalogue, companion to the 2009–10 exhibition curated by Carole McNamara at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor), brings together several eminent scholars of nineteenth-century art and photography to consider questions of influence. We have often heard about the Dutch and English sources that helped spur the nineteenth-century French vogue for painting seascapes, but what about the influence of photography? The Lens of Impressionism explores the idea that photography presented new pictorial modes for representing the Normandy view. Its five authors pursue implications and explications of how painters were inspired to adopt some of those… Full Review

Six years into the afterlife of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), two of his U.S. academic publishers have excavated texts that have photography as their major point of focus, and they have published these pronouncements posthumously. While Copy, Archive, Signature reads as a wide-ranging conversation about a variety of important topics concerning “photography in deconstruction” (to recite the subtitle of editor Gerhard Richter’s astute introduction), Athens, Still Remains is a slim volume that takes the images of the contemporary French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme as a springboard for a larger meditation on photography and its relation to death. The conversation was conducted… Full Review

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is Michael Camille’s long-awaited last book, published seven years after the author’s untimely death in 2002. By that time, the text must have been finished, since the preface is signed: “Paris, February 2001”; the editor indicates that only some of the citations in the footnotes remained incomplete (379). Throughout Camille’s brilliant career he was interested in medieval image making, paying equal attention to “high” and “low” art, a distinction which he identified as a modern construct. Modernity’s shaping influence on perceptions of the Middle Ages was therefore always an important aspect of Camille’s work, as… Full Review

Islamic archaeology is an unusual area of enquiry because as a term it embraces a religious and cultural element as well as an empirical-scientific component. Of course the same could be said of many branches of archaeology, though in present times the use of the term “Islamic” carries with it specific connotations of ideology, belief, ethnicity, and culture. Specifically, the term may be taken to indicate a particular Islamic ideological approach to the practice and study of archaeology. Alternatively, the term may be used in a more neutral sense to indicate the study of Islamic culture, including religion through the… Full Review

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2). The thesis… Full Review

Following an efflorescence of critical work on the subject over the last twenty-five years, the European Grand Tour has emerged as a focus of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. The significance of ancient and Renaissance art to the Grand Tour itinerary—together with the emergence of modern display practices and attendant opportunities for the exercise of aesthetic judgment—have conspired to guarantee the Grand Tour's special appeal to art historians. The subject's enduring interest is surely also due to the fact that it has proven especially fertile ground for art history's disciplinary move toward thinking beyond national borders. The Grand Tour was founded on… Full Review

The necessary precondition for a world art history is the close study of cultural exchanges. Even nowadays, when you can travel from New York to Beijing in less than a day, the distance between America’s and China’s visual cultures is still immense. When such travel was much slower, and curators were not much concerned with exotic art, the diverse artistic traditions were relatively self-sufficient. But once Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the globe, it was inevitable that those artifacts called works of art would move from their places of origin to other cultures. The world had become one, which is to… Full Review

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty was an extensive retrospective composed of over 150 works created by the artist over the last 45 years. To access this exhibition on the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA) campus, I walked through the Ahmanson Building, past EATLACMA, by the contemporary LA artist collective Fallen Fruit, down a set of stairs to cross beneath Smoke, Tony Smith’s soaring hexagonal 1967 sculpture, which quite literally fills the atrium. Exiting that building I walked out onto an outdoor pavilion still under construction, which, I noticed rather ironically, is called the BP Grand Entrance… Full Review

Physicists are poised to articulate a historic “theory of everything” that will tie together gravity, light, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe as merely different manifestations of the same essential subatomic reality. Mark Dion is that rarest of artists whose body of work is arguing for a parallel aesthetic breakthrough: the revelation that not only are sculpture, painting, drawing, and the rest accepted forms of contemporary art, but so too are activities like historical research, interventions, publications, performances, relational aesthetics, collaboration, pedagogy, institutional critique, natural history, anthropology, cultural detritus, and satire, to name just… Full Review

At the outset of this monumental study Margot Fassler takes pains to position herself in relation to Chartes’s “major industry,” the making of history. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, she takes as axiomatic that history is akin to a performance, thoroughly informed by the cultural system in which it is produced (most recently, see Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History, 1000–1500: Art, Music, History, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010; this volume includes a contribution by Fassler). During the Middle Ages, she argues, the liturgical and visual arts often played a key role in this process… Full Review