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

Katharine A. Lochnan and Carol Jacobi, eds.
Exh. cat. Toronto and New Haven: Art Gallery of Ontario in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 224 pp.; 100 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300148329)
Exhibition schedule: Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, October 11, 2008–January 11, 2009; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, February 14–May 10, 2009; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, June 14–September 6, 2009
William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) lived long enough to see his role as founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and dissected. Like John Everett Millais, he was later charged with abandoning his early revolutionary artistic goals and pandering to mainstream taste. Hunt’s popularity represented less of a movement away from early idealism than a gradual refinement and elaboration of it, and the public came to love the work that resulted. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition with the same title, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision offers new insights into how this process unfolded in ten essays, which discuss Hunt’s work from… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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Anne Dunlop
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 340 pp.; 161 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780271034089)
Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall
Exh. cat. Williamstown, MA and Barcelona: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Museu Picasso, 2010. 354 pp.; 310 color ills.; 9 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (9780931102868)
Exhibition schedule: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, June 13–September 12, 2010; Museu Picasso, Barecelona, October 14, 2010–January 16, 2011
The exhibition Picasso Looks at Degas at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened with a statement attributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” That Degas was among those judged worthy of theft—discerned as early as the young Spaniard’s first show in Paris (1901)—was first connected to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Robert Rosenblum (in Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, ed. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher. Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986, 53–60). In Picasso: Style and Meaning (New York: Phaidon, 2002), Elizabeth Cowling opened the way to a broader affiliation by… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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Klaus Biesenbach, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. 224 pp.; 345 ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780870707476)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 14–May 31, 2010
Over the course of a career that spans more than thirty-odd years, Marina Abramović has maintained an unwavering commitment to a form of performance that tests the psychological and physical extremes of the body. The word “commitment” indeed might be the singular most defining characteristic of her art, as well as her approach to the practice of being an artist. Among an early, important group of artists who moved away from the utilization of inert materials in favor of a direct employment of their own bodies (as tool, medium, performer, instigator, facilitator), Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern… Full Review
January 4, 2011
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Anna Pegler-Gordon
American Crossroads, 28.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 344 pp.; 57 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (9780520252981)
In Winslow, Arizona, an immigration inspector stopped a consular official and asked him to produce identification. Despite the card provided, the inspector doubted the official’s status and demanded to see a laborer’s certificate, perhaps hoping to verify identification through the photograph that was mandatory on such certificates. Although this scene sounds like it could be taking place today under SB 1070, the exchange occurred in 1903, and the consular official was not of Mexican descent. During the period of Chinese Exclusion in the United States, the government targeted Chinese not only at the borders but within the country’s interior as… Full Review
December 28, 2010
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Stephen Perkinson
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 352 pp.; 96 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780226658797)
The portrait, defined here as an accurate physiognomic likeness of an individual rendered in an independent image, has been seen as a clear marker of the differences between the representational strategies and priorities of the medieval period and the modern. Indeed, as Stephen Perkinson notes in his introduction to The Likeness of the King, it is tempting to understand “the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a visual symptom marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages” (6). Perkinson counters this with a detailed exploration of how the… Full Review
December 23, 2010
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Edgar Peters Bowron, ed.
Exh. cat. Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Houston: High Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2010. 108 pp.; 50 color ills. Cloth $29.95 (9780300166859)
Exhibition schedule: High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 16, 2010–January 2, 2011; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, February 5–May 1, 2011; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, May 21–August 14, 2011
A small but impressive exhibition, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting brought twelve drawings and thirteen paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh to the United States for a three-city tour in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Houston. Six of the paintings were from the Bridgewater Collection (on long-term loan to the National Gallery), of which four have been purchased by the museum. In Atlanta (where it was seen by this reviewer), the twenty-five works were well displayed in four galleries, the first devoted to Venetian drawings, the remainder exhibiting a concise history of sixteenth-century Venetian painting with… Full Review
December 23, 2010
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E. Luanne McKinnon, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven and Albuquerque: Yale University Press in association with University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2010. 88 pp.; 30 color ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780300164152)
Exhibition schedule: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 25, 2010–January 3, 2011; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, January 28–May 22, 2011; Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, September 16, 2011–January 8, 2012
Eve Hesse Spectres 1960 offers a rare opportunity to look and think carefully about one year in an artist’s career, in this case a very early one. E. Luanne McKinnon’s selection of nineteen paintings (all Untitled) from among the four dozen Eva Hesse made in 1960 offers a satisfying range of small studies and larger compositions, and their hanging within a single gallery at the Hammer allows for provocative overlaps and differences to come forward, leading the viewer confidently into the artist’s thought process. The unobtrusive wall texts that accompany some and not others of these so far rarely… Full Review
December 22, 2010
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Diane Wolfthal
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 224 pp.; 30 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300141542)
Diane Wolfthal’s In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe is yet another beautiful book from Yale University Press. It features a delicious picture on the dust jacket cover of a man and a woman fully covered (well, almost—there have to be openings in their clothing somewhere), making love in a beautiful bed, as another couple peeks through a curtain in order to watch. Meanwhile, a cute little dog at the side of the bed turns its head to observe the voyeurs. In other words, we watch the dog watching the couple watching the lovers. Actually… Full Review
December 22, 2010
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Jasmine Alinder
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 232 pp.; 43 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780252033988)
This lucid, thoughtful, and remarkably terse study provides extensive insight into a variety of subjects: not only into photography of the Japanese American internment during World War II, but also the functions photography can be made to serve in defining loyalty and security risk in other wars, and the authenticity and force of documentary photography in general. Jasmine Alinder, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, is a sophisticated photography critic able to make complex arguments without the jargon that so often characterizes cultural criticism today. Her book can thus serve as a fine introduction to some of the… Full Review
December 16, 2010
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Daniel M. Unger
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. Ed. Allison Levy.. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. 208 pp.; 8 color ills.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754669098)
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (“the squinter”), was born in 1591 in Cento, a small town between Ferrara and Bologna, and died in Bologna in 1666. Born a generation after the Carracci, whose works influenced him, Guercino soon developed a personal style noteworthy for combining naturalism with dramatic chiaroscuro effects. From Cento, he produced paintings for such patrons as Cardinal Jacopo Serra, papal legate to Ferrara; Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua; and Cosimo II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Guercino was enticed away from Cento only when his patron Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV… Full Review
December 16, 2010
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Colleen Denney
Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. 274 pp.; 4 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754668794)
In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision (which is unexplained by the author) excludes a figure like Frances Evelyn "Daisy," Countess of Warwick, author and activist, referred to in the press as… Full Review
December 15, 2010
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Sarah King, ed.
Exh. cat. Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 2010. 240 pp.; 200 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780976449294)
Exhibition Schedule: SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, June 20, 2010–January 2, 2011
Curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco use a metaphor of alchemy to describe the contemporary works they brought together for The Dissolve, their title for the SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial. The ingredients for the new global media practice they highlight are bodily gestures, advanced digital technologies, and inspirations from early twentieth-century motion picture experiments, resulting in, as the exhibition catalogue states, “new hybrid forms where the homespun meets the high-tech” (20). The six-year process of choosing the final thirty works—twenty-six contemporary and four historical—and conceiving of the spatial and textual accoutrements that would do them justice… Full Review
December 15, 2010
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Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds.
New York: Routledge, 2010. 304 pp.; 42 b/w ills. Paper $42.95 (9780415494731)
During the past twenty years the understanding of representations, subjectivities, and societies has been transformed by the proliferation of cultural studies, human rights discourses, activist practices, and interdisciplinary fields. Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum makes an important contribution to each of these areas in its integration of disability studies with museum studies. Editors Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have assembled a volume intended to not only raise theoretical questions, but to serve as a catalyst for change and reform. The vigorous activist agenda of the collection is refreshing, and appropriate, given the subject matter and… Full Review
December 15, 2010
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David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 256 pp.; 89 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Paper $65.00 (9780271035284)
I have become increasingly uneasy about writing book reviews. We need them, and I read them, but when I sit down to write one, I begin to squirm. To write a book review is to climb into the cheapest of judgment seats. Although a book may receive several reviews, each reviewer operates singularly—with a voice from on high—in rendering judgment on the book and its qualities. In addition, the qualifications for writing a book review in the humanities are minimal. Many reviewers are graduate students or young scholars who have not yet written a book and have no direct experience… Full Review
December 9, 2010
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