Recently Published Reviews

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn rewarded patient, introspective viewers with a revelatory experience. Organized by curators Donna De Salvo and Carter E. Foster (of the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Mark Godfrey (of the Tate Modern), this mid-career retrospective compiled three decades of the artist’s quietly enigmatic and provocative photographs, sculptures, drawings, and books. The greatest strength of the exhibition’s recent incarnation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), was the rich dialogue developed between the artwork and its site, the ICA’s magnificent waterfront location. The most challenging aspect of the ICA installation was the relative lack of… Full Review

Tucked away in a Nuremberg archive, sixty-one letters have survived as a unique testament concerning the life of a sixteenth-century Birgittine nun. Writing from the pastoral setting of a south German convent called Maria Mai during the years 1517–1533, Katerina Lemmel maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin Hans Imhoff. Imhoff, a wealthy businessman and Nuremberg patrician, was charged with shepherding Lemmel’s financial affairs during her years of monastic withdrawal. These affairs were surprisingly complex because Lemmel was continually requesting funds in order to improve life at her institution. Only the letters written by Lemmel have survived, not those sent… Full Review

The reign and artistic patronage of Philip III of Spain are often overlooked, lost in the long shadows cast by Philip II and Philip IV, and by El Escorial and Diego Velázquez. Yet, Philip III reigned for nearly a quarter of a century and was a significant patron of the arts. Lisa Banner’s The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598–1621 sheds a powerful new light on Philip III and Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, and in the process illuminates an important period of royal artistic patronage in early Baroque Spain. With great skill… Full Review

As a measure of the critical changes in scholarship in the field of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism over the last two decades, the revised edition of the catalogue of the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that first appeared in 1989 is disappointing. If consulted in order to check the recent bibliography on one of the paintings, or to get a decent catalogue entry with revised dating and, in some cases, revised attribution and/or scientific examination, accompanied by an excellent color reproduction, the volume is satisfactory. Fifty-five entries on works by some eighteen artists is not a bad deal… Full Review

This compilation of essays comprises the most recent scholarly publication devoted to the eleventh-century embroidery housed in Bayeux and reveals new interpretations and innovative approaches. The essays address, often through a theoretical scope, issues pertaining to gender, authority, materiality, patronage, performativity, and the senses. Before continuing, however, a critical statement must be made concerning semantics and the ascribed title of this celebrated work of art. The editors note in the introduction that some of the contributors to the volume maintain the usage of the term “Bayeux Tapestry,” while other authors, namely Madeline Caviness and Karen Eileen Overbey, have opted to… Full Review

Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day. The Academy’s legacy extends even to the enduring assumption that a centralized system of arts administration distinguishes a functioning nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that the Academy should cast a strong shadow in so many histories of post-Renaissance European art… Full Review

Book artists of all times and types have taken literally the idea that we experience books as buildings. Gutenberg’s first Bible was laid out according to the architectural proportions of the golden rectangle; title pages of many early printed books featured etchings of highly wrought façades. These archways invited readers to step through a manifest “door” and into the imaginary spaces—even entire worlds—that books have always provided. More recently, both architecture and literature have been influenced by the philosophy of deconstruction, and contemporary book artists have been reconstructing the book to give new physical forms to old “volumes.” … Full Review

This densely informative and inspiring book engages two scholarly discourses: namely, the visual histories of the regions broadly known as South Asia (India, Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and the Islamic world (mainly referring to the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran). By moving between these major bodies of knowledge, Finbarr B. Flood demonstrates in a more than usually compelling way that academic specialties are artificial constructs designed by and for the convenience of modern scholars; such specialties are often inadequate to the challenge of treating the fluidly mobile people and things that are, ultimately, the actual subjects/objects of… Full Review

In Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000, Charlotte Klonk traces across three urban centers—London, Berlin, and New York—changing exhibition displays in gallery interiors in relation to shifting aesthetic ideals and their public, as well as larger historical and scientific dialogues. This well-illustrated study seeks to address the phenomenon of the modern gallery space, defined as the white cube, and how it differs from “powerful alternatives” (6) that existed historically. Chapters examine the formation of the National Gallery in London; the German museum reform movement around 1900; German exhibitions in the 1920s; their influence and cooptation in the… Full Review

In describing the arrival of Shah ‘Abbas to his capital city, Isfahan, in 1595, the court historian, Afushteh Natanzi, wrote about the marvelous architectural contraptions and other wonders that were designed by the “masters of the arts . . . artists of pure creativity, and devisers of sublime disposition” who were “assembled in the City of Kingship of Iraq [Isfahan] from all parts of Iraq and Fars” (R. D. McChesney, “Four Sources on Shah ‘Abbas's Building of Isfahan,” Muqarnas 5 (1988): 103–134, 107). They were displayed in the main plaza, Maydan-i Naqsh-i Jahan (“Image of the World”), which represented the… Full Review

Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500–1750 tells a story of social class played out in math class. In the exhibition and catalogue, Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston chart the rise of the professional architect in the early modern era by presenting the tools of the trade. Subtitle notwithstanding, Compass and Rule does not focus on architecture itself but rather on architectural drawing, describing the development of drafting techniques and instruments which led to a division between the design and construction phases of building. Although Gerbino and Johnston are not the first scholars to make this argument… Full Review

Barbara Lane’s Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges explores the life and oeuvre of Hans Memling, one of the most important Flemish artists of the fifteenth century. In it, Lane argues that despite various exhibitions of the artist’s works, “many of the tantalizing problems surrounding Memling’s life and work remain unresolved” (10). She offers her book as a remedy to the lingering gaps in Memling scholarship and provides a comprehensive treatment of the artist by dividing her study into four main sections. Section 1, “Wanderjahre,” traces Memling’s early career from his apprentice days through his journeyman years… Full Review

An elegant facsimile edition from Trent and a sophisticated exhibition in Rome are two of the events that celebrate the third centenary of the death of Andrea Pozzo (born Trent, 1642), the renowned Jesuit architect and theoretician whose written work and artistic creations are the focus of this review’s attention. Another exhibition was held in Trent, at the Diocesan Museum, dedicated principally to painting, but is not reviewed here: Eugenio Bianchi et al., eds., Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) (Trent: Tipografia Editrice e Temi, 2009). The centennial celebrations began in 2009 when Pozzo’s treatise, published in Rome in two versions or… Full Review

When visiting most major art collections in Canada—be it the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—one is likely to encounter the distinctive abstractions created by artists affiliated with “Automatisme,” a Montreal-based modernist movement active during the early 1940s through the 1950s. The Automatistes consisted of a group of young painters who gathered around Paul-Émile Borduas, united by their sympathies for European abstraction and outrage over Montreal’s pervasive cultural and political conservatism. The core of this group included Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Roger Fauteux, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Pierre Gauvreau, Louise Renaud, and Jean-Paul… Full Review

Madness and Modernity is an exceptionally well-conceived group effort that succeeds in avoiding the more speculative generalities often found in studies of “madness and art” in the twentieth century. By tracing the effects of specific contacts and commissions, the book offers a persuasive account of the intermingling of the city’s intellectuals and artists at such modern sites as “the coffeehouse, the cabaret, the sanatorium, and the secession building” (8). The result is a sound defense for including the sanatorium in any list of Vienna’s intriguing new modern attractions. Madness and Modernity originated as a research project begun by Lesley Topp… Full Review