Recently Published Reviews

Photography, Roland Barthes argued, is most potent when considered through the lens of death. Or as Geoffrey Batchen’s new edited collection suggests, photography is most potent when considered through the lens of Roland Barthes’s death. As this elegant volume makes evident, contemporary photography studies is simultaneously enervated by Barthes’s continuing, towering presence and yet not ready to let him go. Such is the interminable work of mourning. As the title implies, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida” gathers together writing that is specifically focused on Barthes’s last book to be published during his lifetime. If … Full Review

Philip B. Betancourt’s Introduction to Aegean Art, as its title suggests, presents a concise, up-to-date introduction to the art and culture of the Greek Bronze Age, ca. 3000–1000 BCE. Prehistoric Aegean art encompasses three distinct cultural realms: Minoan, Cycladic, and Helladic/Mycenaean. Narrative explanations of the origin of Western art often depict the art of these cultures as a vital link between the early artistic works of Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations and the later achievements of Classical antiquity. Yet Aegean prehistory itself remains a complex and rapidly evolving field of study too often accessible only to the specialist… Full Review

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals poses an immediate challenge: what is the audience for a coffee table book about a miserable subject? It is as oxymoronic as a junker limousine or a hairless cat, but contradiction is the essence of this nonetheless earnest book. Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in depicting industrial architecture. His previous book illustrated the substations that power the New York City subway. In Asylum, he continues to publish his photos of unusual and outsized architecture, here with the benefit of a preface written by internationally renowned neurologist… Full Review

In 1872, Victorian readers were presented with Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The work notably attempted to extend the great naturalist’s theory of evolution through natural selection to understanding the developmental history of expression. In support of Darwin’s attempt to provide evolutionary explanations for the physical manifestation of emotions, the book made considerable use of photographic material; and so it became one of the first scientific works to deploy the technology, despite being published just over three decades since both Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot had announced their discoveries to a broader public… Full Review

Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she writes, designs, and prints—artists’ books. The publication of The Square offers the opportunity to experience a new work by this artist, a product of her long-running and deep engagement with the book as an artistic vehicle. The Square is typographically sophisticated and superbly well-produced, but its objective is not a celebration of craft, nor is it intended to be a luxury product for high-end consumption. It is an original, inventive, and transformative work of art that offers… Full Review

In his seminal collection of essays The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois, preeminent educator, scholar, and founder of the NAACP, traced a genealogy of black life in the United States as a way to demystify for his readers “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.” Assembling a collage of narratives that wove poignant personal recollections with a collective history of slavery, racial oppression, civil rights, race leadership, religion, social progress, and black cultural expression, Du Bois solemnly concluded that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem… Full Review

Rare is the traveler who won't admit that one of the joys of exploring a "new world" is bringing home cherished souvenirs. Conversely, sometimes access to a place is limited to an armchair traveler's fantasies about a precious relic, which signifies, imaginatively, a distant land. Such was the case for the Medici in Florence, who are known to have collected feather cloaks from Brazil, and for Albrecht Dürer, who marveled at objects exhibited in Brussels from "the new land of gold" (13). As Edward J. Sullivan discusses in The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas, objects… Full Review

Jakarta, today a metropolis of twelve million inhabitants, was once the center of the Dutch colonial empire. Known in the seventeenth century as Batavia, the “Queen of the East,” the city headquartered the Dutch East Indies Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Following Indonesian independence in 1945, it became the “exemplary center” of Sukarno, the first president of the decolonized nation, who turned the main boulevard of Jakarta into an exhibit of modernist buildings and urban spaces. Today, like many capital cities of Asian countries, Jakarta is a world city and the center of Indonesia’s government, business activity… Full Review

In 1823, two British architects, Samuel Angell and William Harris, ventured to excavate at Selinunte in the course of their tour of Sicily, and came upon many fragments of sculptured metopes from the Archaic temple now known as “Temple C.” Although local officials tried to stop them, they continued their work, and attempted to export their finds to England, destined for the British Museum. Now in the shadow of the activities of Lord Elgin, Angell and Harris’s shipments were diverted to Palermo, where they remain to this day in the Archaeological Museum. The three better-preserved metopes (depicting a… Full Review

It is an open secret that many museums, large and small, owe the strength of their collections to women patrons, yet few scholars to date have studied women as serious art collectors and tastemakers. Biographies exist of individuals from Catherine the Great to Peggy Guggenheim, but the collection and arrangement of beautiful things was a more widespread pastime among women than biographers suggest. The most deeply historicized, contextualized study of women patrons thus far concerns the Renaissance; we still have much to learn about how gender, art, politics, and collecting interrelated in the modern era. It seems entirely appropriate, therefore… Full Review

The recent Iranian presidential election and the untimely death of popular music icon Michael Jackson make an odd pair, to say the least. Yet, these two events, which dominated media coverage and drew international audiences during the summer of 2009, point to a fundamental shift in the relationship between social knowledge, public spectacle, politics, and photography. The widespread audience for photographic media, no longer just a body of spectators, is now engaged as both the producer and consumer of the photographic public sphere. As a result, official exhibitions, governmental programs, museums, and the press are straining to keep pace with… Full Review

The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum. In her introduction Welch sets out her intentions—to examine the… Full Review

Many years ago one of my dissertation advisors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University proclaimed that there was no such thing as Jewish art in antiquity and the late Roman world, there was only Jewish iconography. His claim reflected the view of the generation of scholars that Steven Fine characterizes, somewhat ungenerously, as following the “Jews don’t do art” school of thought (2). The leading figure in this historiography is Erwin R. Goodenough, whose monumental Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (13 vols., New York: Pantheon, 1953–68), argued that Jewish imagery was created by “another… Full Review

What constitutes modernity? More to the point, what did modernity mean to the Impressionists? What concept of it did they admit or celebrate in their paintings? The usual and by now routine answers to these questions revolve around the subject of bourgeois recreation. Beginning with Meyer Schapiro’s essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 [January–March 1937]: 77–98) and continuing a half-century later in the work of T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, New York: Knopf, 1984) and Robert Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure and… Full Review

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the last attempts to write the Gothic Summa. I think particularly of Jean Bony’s French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), much criticized at the time for its “modernistic” viewpoint and for detaching buildings from their historical context in the construction of the big, style-based story of Gothic; also relevant is Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130–1270 by Dieter Kimpel and Robert Suckale (Descrizione libro: Hirmer Verlag, 1985), which veered in the opposite direction, locating architecture within ideologies of power and… Full Review