Recently Published Reviews

During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation was an adaptation of what one might encounter in her New York home. Upon visiting Sikkim as a young woman, Kandell became fascinated by Tibetan… Full Review

The modest title of Matthew Reeve’s book Thirteenth-Century Wall Painting of Salisbury Cathedral: Art, Liturgy and Reform only hints at the rich investigation contained therein. Salisbury Cathedral furnishes an unusual instance in which the building itself was constructed on a virgin site in one long campaign (ca. 1220–58), and where there is extensive evidence of the structure’s painted program. Moreover, the details of the celebration of the liturgy within this space are known since it was made to house the newly minted Sarum Rite, written at Salisbury perhaps by the bishop who inaugurated the cathedral-building program, Richard Poore (r. 1217–28)… Full Review

The museum marks a place where rule-based ethics and a reliance on principles, codes, laws, and mission statements actively intersect with situational ethics and the invocation of consequentialist arguments. While it may not be news that, in theory, the ethical dimensions of museum practice involve every area of the profession and all genres of museums, the manifold ways in which theory might confront those practices are sometimes less clear. At New Directions in Museum Ethics: Conference of Graduate Student Research a diverse group, including graduate students, recent graduates, and senior scholar/practitioners in various specializations and disciplines, made… Full Review

One of Spain’s most intriguing monuments is the royal monastery church of San Isidore in Léon. It is well known for its extensive cycles of capitals, its Romanesque portals, and above all the paintings in the so-called Pantheon de los Reyes at the west end of the church. Previous scholars have usually held the Infanta Urraca (d. 1101), sister of King Alfonso VI, responsible for the rebuilding of the church, or have considered the Infanta Sancha (d. 1159) as the patron of the building. The latter view is based on the evidence provided by a dedicatory relief in the… Full Review

This exhibition and catalogue reassemble the surviving fragments of one of Paolo Veronese’s largest altarpieces, a work completed around 1565 for the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli to adorn the family’s chapel in San Francesco at Lendinara, a town west of Rovigo in the Po valley. The church no longer survives, and Veronese’s altarpiece had disappeared by 1795. The three largest fragments have been known to relate for more than a century, but only recently has Xavier Salomon recognized the small Head of an Angel in the Blanton Museum of Art as the missing archangel from the center. Thanks to… Full Review

Poet, urban chronicler, and queer dandy about town, Salvador Novo helped give modernism in Mexico its shape while never quite fitting in. A consummate insider-outsider, he found perches in the government and at various publications throughout his career, though he never stayed for very long. In the 1920s and 1930s, Novo was a member of the Contemporáneos literary circle, which was known for its high-meets-low tastes and cosmopolitan orientation. He published prodigiously—“promiscuously” according to his critics who advocated a folkloric cultural nationalism—with writings ranging from the cunning to tongue-in-cheek. Many of his stories circulated in the new illustrated magazines that… Full Review

The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true: the author is a scholar and teacher of respected and possibly unchallenged authority in the field. But the impressive tome is perhaps more a landmark in the sense of being the last monument in a tradition than wholly a volume for the future. Christoph Luitpold Frommel writes from a formidable vantage point, Rome, where he has spent decades in meticulous and groundbreaking research, documented in his vast… Full Review

This useful collection of previously published essays appears in a series of course readers in museum studies edited by Simon Knell. The goal of this particular anthology is to illuminate the impact of digital media on museum exhibitions and on the conserving of digital artifacts in museums. Knell’s explanation of the general goals of the series ends with a citation from Michel Foucault as a guide to each volume's efforts to update museum studies curricula. With that directive, it is inevitable that the series will have to navigate between the most mundane practical concerns, in this case how to run… Full Review

This is a beautifully designed book, and the credit goes to Janet Wood, who has given us a distinctively shaped volume, eight by six inches, which rests comfortably in the hand. The layout of the book, the typeface and margins, are pleasing to the eye, as are the copious illustrations, mostly in color. One cannot begin to imagine an electronic version of this book nearly so inviting as this lovely tome. The enticing dust jacket, set against a field of salad green, features an illustration of Pieter Aertsen’s Market Woman at a Vegetable Stand (1567). Aertsen’s woman gestures with one… Full Review

On August 27, 2005, a large crowd including residents of a psychiatric facility in Mexicali gathered just to the south of a jagged, oceanside metal fence in Playas di Tijuana, Mexico. The crowd counted down and watched, cheering, as David “The Bullet” Smith shot out of a cannon, flew through the air, and landed, bouncing several times, in a net slung in San Diego’s Border Field State Park. This event, staged to critique U.S. immigration policy while exposing “mental and spatial borders,” was also an artwork created by Javier Tèllez to inaugurate inSITE’s “anti-biennial” contemporary art exhibition. One Flew Over… Full Review

In the preface to Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Victoria Alexander reminds her readers that “scholarship . . . necessarily constructs an arena in which combatants from different perspectives battle over each other’s claims” (xiii).The role of scholarship, so defined, has had a rather negligible, and virtually non-existent, place in the traditional development of arts management as a field. It has evolved, instead, through a process of apprenticeship and practice (which in itself may be worthy of scholarly inquiry). Even so, as a relative late-comer to academia and to recognition as a formal… Full Review

In his magisterial survey of British art, commissioned for the gold standard Pelican History of Art and first published in 1953, Ellis Waterhouse paused in his discussion of Thomas Gainsborough and made the following admission: “Unpleasant as it still is for some of us to introduce the shade of Marx into the history of art, it may contribute to the understanding of Gainsborough” (261). This passage attests to the anxiety of the art historian in introducing even the most innocuous hint of social analysis into the study of art during the post-war period. Waterhouse’s colleague and contemporary Anthony Blunt would… Full Review

Regarding Romantic Rome, a series of ten essays edited and introduced by Richard Wrigley, casts new light on a subject almost as well trodden as the streets of the famed city itself. The fruit of a conference held in 2003 at the British School in Rome with the cooperation of the Art History Department of Oxford Brookes University, this slim tome brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields including literature, graphic design, women’s studies, and European history. Despite the many previous books on the subject,[1] the introduction states that the authors return to Rome, not to revisit… Full Review

In the first gallery of the Montclair Art Museum’s excellent and illuminating exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism, two arresting views of Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1927 by the American artist Marsden Hartley flanked a painting by Paul Cézanne of the same subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (ca. 1897), an exemplary work by that artist, acquired by the Baltimore collector Claribel Cone in 1925. The comparison drawn between Cézanne and Hartley (same subject, related style) mirrored the strategy employed in the majority of the exhibition’s galleries, where affinities of subject matter and style or technique dictated the grouping… Full Review

William E. Jones’s artists’ book Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton is an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture. It is the third of four Jones books published by 2nd Cannons, along with Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), and Heliogabalus (2009). All reflect a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media. As such the book is an excellent complement to Jones’s time-based work in film, video,… Full Review