Recently Published Reviews

In Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Millard Meiss argued that Tuscan society regarded the various calamities of the mid-trecento as divine punishment for its worldly ways, which led to a rejection of what he regarded as the human-centered, naturalistic pictorial style of early trecento art and a revival of the spiritually-centered, abstract style of the previous century. Early criticism notwithstanding (Benjamin Rowland, Jr., The Art Bulletin 34 (1952): 319–22), Meiss’s theory became the paradigm under which a generation of historians worked. However, in the 1970s, challenges to the theory mounted, beginning… Full Review

What is the meaning of the guillotine? The question crossed my mind as I read through the material that makes up this heterogeneous yet fascinating volume, along with some others: What is the ethical weight of dismemberment? How much of pain and loss survives in the remains of broken things, how much of a thrilling sense of freedom? The Fragment: An Incomplete History, which contains ten essays written by scholars of art history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, numismatics, topography, and film, with one contribution by the artist Cornelia Parker, provokes such questions. Of course to not finish something because… Full Review

Scenes of everyday life, commonly called genre scenes, were enormously popular in early nineteenth-century Britain. But their narrative emphasis, often with a strong moral message, and their humorous anecdotal detail damaged their reception in the modern era. As a result, this important subject has generally been neglected in serious art-historical studies. David Solkin’s new book, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, happily rectifies this. While steeped in recent scholarship, Solkin brings a wealth of new information, a remarkably observant eye, and an insightful, even adventurous analysis to this material… Full Review

“Do not live in a town without a temple,” says the Tamil epigraph with which Gods on the Move begins. In the Tamil region of South India, large temple complexes can be recognized today in almost every small and big city by their red-and-white striped walls; tall, gaudily painted gateways (gopuras); and a bustle of pilgrims, beggars, and flower-sellers. Branfoot’s interest in the subject was piqued by marketplaces in Cairo, as he states in the acknowledgments. The book explains how and why temples became similarly pervasive spaces for public gathering in the Tamil region; it does so by… Full Review

J. Paul Getty purchased his first work of art, a painting, in 1931 and, eight years later, his first antiquity. Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities, on view at the Getty Villa in Malibu, thus marked the seventieth anniversary of the initiation of a renowned and still-expanding collection. The exhibition was a natural for the museum, particularly since the construction of the Getty Center has allowed the Villa to devote itself entirely to the art of the ancient world. Where better to think about Getty’s collecting habits than deep inside the building he designed, an environment inspired… Full Review

The title of this far-reaching book suggests a simple journey through time and place. Given the impressive number of sites, authors, and disciplines it engages, however, the reader should envisage a comfortable vehicle and a good deal of time to take everything in, because, more than telling the story of French fascination with the lost world of Pompeii, From Paris to Pompeii explores how archaeology functioned as a metaphor that inspired Romantic cultural productions stretching from literature to art to history. The reader-cum-armchair archaeologist encounters a sprawling complex as rich as the famous buried city itself. While Victor Hugo and… Full Review

There was a time when architecture existed mainly in the physical reality of the built environment and in the imagination. That was before it became a standard ingredient of the contemporary media, and a subject attracting the interest of historians, travelers, writers, and the general population. Exactly how this happened is not easy to reconstruct, but it seems very likely that some major changes took place in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the modern public and its attendant configuration of public and private spheres. In this important book, Richard Wittman suggests that many of the defining… Full Review

For more than a decade, Christopher Pinney has dominated the visual anthropology of photography. His first major book, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), argued that, despite its long imbrication in projects of colonial documentation and moral education, photography in India is a discourse, an institution, and a set of practices that enabled self-idealization, social masquerade, and a creative destabilization of the very identities that photography, in its colonial mode, had attempted to establish. He analyzed the staging of profilmic moments and the techniques of overpainting, collage, and double exposure by which… Full Review

Despite its relative youth as a field of academic inquiry, the study of photography has reached a point where it has a discernable history. In 2005, two major conferences sought explicitly to wrestle with, outline, account for, and depart from the past twenty-five to thirty years of scholarly writing on photography, which was itself predated by several decades of influential studies of photographic objects within the context of the art museum. The books under consideration here are the edited proceedings of these 2005 conferences; both suggest that, as many scholars have argued about photographs themselves, the field of photography studies… Full Review

The visual artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group are not so well known in the United States. The explanations for this are varied, but essentially boil down to the fact that few of them ever achieved fame here for their art. Roger Fry was best known for the pioneering art criticism he wrote in the early days of modernism; Vanessa Bell is most often portrayed as the artist sister of Virginia Woolf; Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant, both talented artists, typically earn brief mention as part of the broader group of creative individuals who formed part of the group. In… Full Review

With the recent ushering in of the second decade of the twenty-first century and the Era of Obama, the study of the black body has fully entered the field of art-historical and visual culture studies, along with being one of the most popular sites of social, cultural, and political contestation. In fact it has long been a particularly fertile field for academic rumination and semiotic dissection as well as the subject of numerous art collections and archival projects, including Dominique de Menil’s singular Archive of the Image of the Black in Western Art, now in the care of the W… Full Review

There are many reasons to recommend John Peffer’s Art and the End of Apartheid. It makes significant headway toward recording histories and interpreting art of the 1970s and 1980s that were somewhat overlooked post-1994 when South Africa held its first democratic election and art enthusiasts rushed in. (There is some difficulty assigning a date to apartheid’s “end,” but Peffer chooses 1994 for this reason. He “begins” in 1976, when a peaceful march by Soweto students was met with violence. This sparked numerous uprisings nationwide and refueled outright resistance.) The author untangles knotted debates about the call to represent (… Full Review

Organized by Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective offers the richest survey of this artist’s oeuvre in more than a quarter century. With nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as some comparative works and materials, the exhibition traces the full range of Gorky’s career and amply demonstrates his critical importance as a late Surrealist on the threshold of Abstract Expressionism. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition unfolded chronologically through ten galleries, with several rooms large enough to… Full Review

In Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, Aruna D’Souza offers a fresh, original perspective on the bather paintings Cézanne made from the mid-1870s to 1906 as well as what has been written about them. Her book has two main objectives: to analyze the construction of Cézanne’s biography, which has shaped much of the criticism and art-historical analysis of his bather paintings; and to demonstrate that Cézanne imbued his bather paintings with the erotic through his process/technique of painting along with the material of paint itself. The nature of D’Souza’s argument requires clear, precise illustrations, which Cézanne’s Bathers… Full Review

The history of modern interwar architecture has been told many times, first by a generation of critics committed to ensuring that this experiment endured and next by scholars, many of whom were also passionate defenders of what had once been highly experimental forms. The first satisfied itself with the analysis of the physical object (form, plan, construction), supported by the theories of its architects; the second has excavated the archival record, using drawings and letters, but also journal and sometimes even newspaper articles, to reconstruct the design process as well as client demands. Neither Sabine Hake, professor of German… Full Review