Recently Published Reviews

Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, Thread provides a revealing case study of the specificity of an artistic material and the mutability of that material’s significance in the art world. She follows Glenn Adamson’s insight that “craft” is an idea, not a particular material or practice (Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft, London: Berg, 2007, xxix). Accepting that principle, however, Auther does not abandon material specificity but, rather, explores the historically shifting resonances of one material typically associated with the idea of craft, namely, fiber. What she discovers is that fiber’s meaning shifts, but it nearly always determines an artwork’s “proper”… Full Review

The artist’s book Sanctus Sonorensis by Philip Zimmermann is straightforward in content yet complex in associational meanings. Through image and text it refers directly to the New Testament, the Sonoran Desert landscape, and illegal immigration, and also to religious pilgrimages and recent Arizona immigration laws. As a book it calls attention to its objectness with mass and weight—a thing with its own set of meanings. The figure/ground relationships are unambiguous in design yet complicated in translation. To fully engage Sanctus Sonorensis, one must read the words, the images, and the object, and let the mind travel through implied paths… Full Review

Scholars interested in using works of art to understand the lives of individuals and groups in the past can only be discouraged by the realization that so many of the works we study were created at the instigation of elites as demonstrations of wealth and power. While we might want to understand how these works related to members of diverse levels of society, the surviving evidence is generally restricted to information about the motivations and responses of members of the upper classes. This means that in our scholarly lives historians of the Renaissance are consigned to study the Medici, the… Full Review

A grey-green architectural screen with an arcaded view of late medieval Florence—an enlarged detail of the fourteenth-century fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia in the Loggia del Bigallo—drew visitors to the Mount Holyoke Art Museum and into the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Gallery where they encountered the realm of the sacred. Twenty objects dated from ca. 1385 to ca. 1475 comprised The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy, including two sculptures and a cassone. These were installed on and against subdued jewel-toned walls of blue and red. The works were arranged… Full Review

The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum's acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mary Hamilton (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins… Full Review

Ann Jensen Adams begins her book by observing that seventeenth-century Dutch portraits were displayed in a wide variety of contexts; they were “everywhere.” While it would be hyperbolic to declare scholarly studies of early modern portraiture to be everywhere, the last few decades have indeed witnessed an expansion of interest, notably in the portraiture of Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Adams’s book follows the tendency of recent scholars to shift scrutiny away from considerations of style and mimesis, and toward socio-cultural context and viewer response. Yet there is no book on Dutch portraiture quite like Adams’s in the breadth… Full Review

Spain’s Museo del Prado has begun to pay attention to the nineteenth century. Such welcome interest first became evident in 2007, when an ambitious expansion provided space for a comprehensive introduction to The Nineteenth Century in the Prado, an exhibition and catalogue that documented some ninety-five seldom-displayed works from the museum’s collection (click here for review). Sorolla, 1863–1923, an exhibition of 102 paintings by Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla, follows on this success and stands, one hopes, as one of many shows that will bring nineteenth-century Spanish painting to the attention of art historians outside the Peninsula… Full Review

It is nothing new that an exhibition catalogue, such as this one from the Prado, proves to be of academic importance. However, in the field of Golden Age Spanish Art Studies over recent decades a number of catalogues have served as landmarks signalling substantial advances in the understanding of the social, intellectual, and cultural significance of Spanish paintings and sculptures. The genre’s multifaceted approach articulated through a range of essays permits a deeper interdisciplinary study of artworks by a range of scholars. An excellent example of this is another volume accompanying a recent Prado exhibition, the 2007 Velázquez's Fables: Mythology… Full Review

Scholars will be grateful for the meticulous analysis in Cordula Grewe’s Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, which demonstrates that “any real understanding of European art’s development in the nineteenth century must involve an understanding of the Nazarene movement” (1). In 1809, an overtly Catholic group in Vienna, consisting of Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and four companions, founded the Lucasbund, the Brotherhood of St. Luke. By 1810, the comrades were in Rome and lodged in the former Franciscan cloister of San Isidoro, secularized during Napoleon’s occupation. Others joined them: Peter Cornelius in 1812, Wilhelm Schadow in… Full Review

Where is the discourse now about race and power in museums? More than twenty years ago, the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution set the terms of the debate when it hosted two conferences on “the presentation and interpretation of diversity in museums.” The resulting publications, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Karp, Lavine, and Christine Mullen Kreamer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,1992), brought together papers by curators, anthropologists,… Full Review

The Victorian photocollage, pictured so richly in the plates of this book, is whimsical and more than a little strange. Pasted portraits cut from cartes de visite adorn everything from hand-drawn spider webs, to playing cards, to oddly scaled watercolor tableaux of drawing rooms with out-of-whack perspectives. They first read as interior fantasies, surreal Victorian curiosities—fascinating but illegible. As curator Elizabeth Siegel puts it, “Victorian photocollage . . . suffers the double indignity of being the product of both industrial production and feminine craft” (14). Gender and technique place Victorian photocollage on the margins of modernist narratives of photographic history… Full Review

The catalogues for two collaborative exhibitions of African textiles on view in the fall of 2009—one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University—bear striking similarities, at least in outward appearances. Comparable in length, they each feature essays and a selection of illustrated artworks with accompanying page-length captions. They also draw on similar phrases, such as “Poetics of Cloth,” which is both the title of the Grey Art Gallery catalogue and of Alisa LaGamma’s essay in the one accompanying the Met’s exhibition. There is even an overlap in the contemporary textile… Full Review

Martha Langford’s Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums analyzes forty-one photographic albums compiled between 1860 and 1960, now in the McCord Museum of Canadian History. They are ordinary albums, a mixture of commercial and amateur photographs of places and people, none especially famous, preserved because of their relevance to Canadian social history. Some are “accompanied by lists, genealogies, clippings, and personal letters that place the albums in a familial context” (6), while others have only a few names inscribed on the pages. All of them, however, seem soaked in intimacy and affection, even if the scarcity of… Full Review

The writing of James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition James Barry (1741–1806): ‘The Great Historical Painter’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays… Full Review

Evelyn Welch’s fascinating Shopping in the Renaissance, now in its second printing, has garnered glowing reviews and awards in the five years since its first appearance. I will not go against this well-deserved tide of opinion; instead (and at the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned), I want to consider how the book intersects with art history and where it might be most useful to students of art. Although Shopping in the Renaissance is beautifully illustrated with images of paintings, prints, and other crafted objects, its subject encompasses shopping for all sorts of things. Indeed, it is striking how little… Full Review