Recently Published Reviews

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a major exhibition at the Clark Art Institute curated by Debra Bricker Balken, began with an intriguing juxtaposition. Opposite the introductory text, one found Arthur Dove’s Moon (1935) mounted side by side with Georgia O’Keeffe’s last and most abstract Jack-in-the-Pulpit, VI (1930). These paintings show the two artists working in distinct styles within the modernist arc of nature abstraction. Yet the show’s organizing premise, that Dove profoundly affected O’Keeffe’s early artistic development, was here counterbalanced by a conversation. We saw the two in dialogue at mid-career, hardly referencing the deep Depression at the door, exploring… Full Review

Classical mimesis, the privileged aesthetic model for antiquity, involved a combination of imitation, invention, and idealization. To paint the ideal beauty of Helen of Troy, for example, the fourth-century BCE Greek artist Zeuxis copied and combined the best features of five live female models. In Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, Elizabeth C. Mansfield argues that the myth of Zeuxis selecting models is “about” classical mimesis itself, and the fundamental contradiction between its means, copying from the real, and its end, a visual rendering of the ideal. The story has held a preeminent place in Western art… Full Review

Cézanne and Beyond is the impressive catalogue published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2009. Conceived as a companion to the catalogue of the 1995–96 Cézanne retrospective, also shown in Philadelphia, which spelled out the critical fortunes of Cézanne’s art during his lifetime, this volume focuses exclusively on the artistic reception of Cézanne’s art as seen in the work of sixteen artists ranging from Henri Matisse to Jeff Wall. Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs, the editors of Cézanne and Beyond (and the major organizers of the exhibition), make clear in the… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is ideally suited for an exhibition devoted to the theme of “Watteau, Music, and Theater” because two of Watteau’s most incisive treatments of these themes reside in its collection: the solitary singer Mezzetin (ca. 1718–20) and the tragic-comic French Comedians (ca. 1720–21). Both works also display Watteau’s ineffable fusion of performance and humanity, artifice and nature, and gestures both rote and heartfelt. The exhibition, rich in drawings as well as paintings loaned from a wide variety of institutions and private collections, allowed viewers to ponder the artist’s compelling transformation of music and theater into an… Full Review

In 1661, in his mid-fifties, Rembrandt van Rijn painted himself as the Christian apostle Paul (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Typical for the artist, this late work circled back to an interest that had occupied him since the beginning of his career (e.g., Two Old Men [Peter and Paul?] in Disputation [1628, Melbourne]). Typically, too, Rembrandt took the opportunity to transform this exotically garbed figure into an essay in unsparing self-reflection. Significantly, however, of nearly seventy self-portraits this is the only one in which the artist assumed the guise of an identifiable Biblical character. Thus, his self-identification with Paul is not to be… Full Review

Near the end of Seeing Mexico Photographed, Leonard Folgarait names the subject of inquiry that unfurls in his meticulously elaborated study of post-revolutionary Mexico: “photographic thinking” (180). We can say that this meditative book is itself an experiment in such thinking, which the author simultaneously describes and enacts in three distinctive chapters. While the historical period is more or less the same as his important study, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), the methodology and the knowledge produced here represent significant departures from this earlier work… Full Review

In her new book, Empire, Architecture and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914, Zeynep Çelik has taken on a complex and ambitious task: the comparative examination of empire building in two different contexts, the French colonies of North Africa and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This is a messy, even unruly comparison given the different political structures and geographies involved, complicated further by the uneven resources and disparate structures of the archives on which the project depends, as Çelik herself acknowledges (10). However, Çelik is uniquely positioned to write such a work, given her impressive earlier publications that… Full Review

Rabun Taylor, although he does not claim as much, provides us with a sort of cultural poetics of mirrors and reflection in the Roman world. In other words, he does not offer us another typology or iconography of ancient mirrors (we have those already); nor does he dwell long on ancient thinking about the optics of reflection. Instead, he investigates the place of mirrors and reflection in the Roman imagination—especially their metaphorical use as agents of transformation. The subject requires him to be conversant with both textual sources and artistic depictions of the theme, and Taylor moves back and forth… Full Review

Given its location in Chicago, the Renaissance Society was the perfect venue for Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables, forty photographs and accompanying texts three years in the making. The exhibition represented a joint commission between the Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. Polonia refers to Poles living outside their country, and Chicago is host to the largest population outside of Warsaw. For centuries, Poland has been dominated by other nations, by the church, and, as this exhibition showed, by the interests of Western multi-national corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Polish identity perennially… Full Review

Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World defied conventional boundaries of what constitutes “Spanish” art. It was a refreshingly intelligent exhibition, and ideally will set new standards for how the field is studied. It presented the imagery of Catholicism as a common denominator of Spanish identity in Old World and New. The stunning selection of objects was presented in six thematic sections to remind viewers of their original raison d’être: “In Defense of Images,” “True Likeness,” “Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,” “Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” Ronda Kasl, Senior Curator of Painting… Full Review

This ambitious, two-volume catalogue of sixteenth-century drawings in Midwestern American collections is the second in a series sponsored by the Midwest Art History Society. The first installment in the series treated drawings datable before 1500 (Drawings in Midwestern Collections, Volume I, Early Works, A Corpus Compiled by the Midwest Art History Society, Burton L. Dunbar and Edward J. Olszewski, eds., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), and the final volume will consider drawings from the Carracci into the eighteenth century. The sixteenth-century catalogue provides a valuable resource for scholars by illustrating and cataloguing an impressive 471 drawings from… Full Review

BEFORE I’ve decided on the odd but I think appropriate approach of starting to write about Tino Sehgal before seeing the exhibition because so much discussion and disclosure has taken place about it, a lot of it on web-based networking sites such as Facebook and art sites such as Artnet, and most of it in reaction to Sehgal's efforts to control "the situation" and his brand. This discourse is part of the total experience of a project that for some is important, even transformative of the nature of art, precisely insofar as it produces discussion, not in and of… Full Review

The Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum recently organized a visually rich exhibition featuring thirty-two Japanese folding-screen compositions from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Sporting a different title at each location, the exhibition brought together the best of both collections and smartly used the diverse works to present a multi-faceted introduction to the folding screen. The two museums fashioned surprisingly different viewing experiences. With illustrated, bilingual gallery texts, detailed individual labels, and a looping video on a contemporary work that periodically sent classical bugaku music reverberating throughout its high-ceilinged galleries, the Art Institute offered abundant… Full Review

Childhood often conjures images of an idyllic time of innocence and bliss. Although captivating to the popular imagination, such visions are by no means timeless or universal, and perhaps nothing more than nostalgic conceit. This is where the curators of Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood, April Watson and Jane Aspinwall, intervened by assembling a variety of photographic images of children, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Of the forty-four photographers represented, most were American, save for Brits Lewis Carroll and Cecil Beaton, the German photographer August Sander, the Italian-born Frederick Sommer and Jocelyn Lee, and the Japanese… Full Review

Among cross-disciplinary connections, perhaps none is so elusive, so fraught with traps, as the boundary between history and art history. It is a boundary all the more striking for its invisibility. Art historians typically assume that they are partaking in historical study, that the tools they bring to cultural artifacts from the past illuminate an understanding comparable to that of their historian colleagues. All the greater their surprise, then, when they attend a history seminar or delve into historical journals and discover that their colleagues actually speak a different language and reach sometimes strikingly unfamiliar conclusions. Confusion and misunderstanding can… Full Review