Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Exhibition schedule: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, June 20–September 6, 2009
The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963–2000, showcased eighty-one prints by the master African American artist in a crowd-pleasing exhibition that provided a platform for one of the lesser-known parts of Lawrence’s extensive oeuvre. The screenprints, lithographs, etchings, drypoints, and single woodcut displayed in the show represented almost the entirety of Lawrence’s output as a printmaker and were brought together courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery in New York for this show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. While the images, most of which are large and colorful in the artist’s trademark graphic figurative style, are filled with the… Full Review
October 28, 2009
Ann Goldstein, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MIT Press, 2008. 372 pp.; 151 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $44.95 (9781933751092)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, September 20, 2008–January 5, 2009; Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 1–May 11, 2009
The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger's work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger's work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed… Full Review
October 28, 2009
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David Carrier
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 200 pp.; 11 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780271034140)
“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” (58). Urgency is an unusual accomplice to art-historical inquiry: what might prompt it now, and why should it require a “world history of art,” whatever that might be? David Carrier sees desired states of being such as world peace endangered by “the political struggles that threaten to destroy the very possibility of international cooperation” (xxvi). Academics, he believes, should respond to such threats by rethinking their disciplines as genuinely global projects. In a… Full Review
October 22, 2009
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Lisa Monnas
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 352 pp.; 150 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300111170)
In recent decades, medieval and Renaissance textile scholarship has received greater recognition and appreciation by the art-historical community. One of the latest publications to add to this developing field is Lisa Monnas’s new book. One of the first things to note about this impressive volume is the abundant number of superb color images—they are truly breathtaking. Aside from the remarkable aesthetic attributes of the volume, Monnas’s detailed study investigates the cultural and artistic connections between silk textiles and fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings in which silk fabrics are represented. In addition to relating extant textiles to the paintings, Monnas examines… Full Review
October 22, 2009
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Mark D. Stansbury-O'Donnell
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 330 pp.; 76 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (9780521853187)
The device of figures framing a central mythological or non-mythological composition is a frequent phenomenon in Athenian vase painting. These spectators have been interpreted as stock characters, super-numeraries, aristocrats, or simply onlookers. In his innovative Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell examines the role of spectators on Athenian vases as “guides to the construction of social identity in sixth-century Athens” (11). Stansbury-O’Donnell bases his investigation on the assumption that the spectators “watch the action, not unlike a viewer of the vase” (2). He focuses not only on the identity of the spectators but also… Full Review
October 22, 2009
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Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas, eds.
Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 161 pp.; 26 b/w ills. Cloth $49.99 (9781847184542)
Stimulated by the availability of new technologies, the pedagogy of art history is in the midst of dramatic transformation. Until recently, college courses in the discipline were customarily illustrated using manually sequenced film transparencies extracted from local slide libraries. Now, nearly overnight, it seems, art history programs have all but abandoned that tried and true method in favor of PowerPoint presentations assembling digital files downloaded from shared image databases. Meanwhile, class meetings in brick and mortar settings are giving way to electronic communications among disparately located teachers and students participating in distance-learning courses. What are the implications of this upheaval… Full Review
October 21, 2009
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Annabeth Headrick
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. 226 pp.; 131 ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780292716650)
Unlike their Mesoamerican counterparts, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan (50–750 C.E.) left no clear record identifying those responsible for developing the sophisticated urban plan of their great city-state; the presumed rulers who commandeered the power and authority to assemble the work force required to carry out the massive construction and artistic programs at Teotihuacan remain unnamed. Although recent excavations at the Pyramid of the Moon reveal high-status burials, there are as yet no clear portraits nor excavated remains that clearly locate specific rulers. Questions about the sociopolitical makeup of Teotihuacan and the identity of their leaders have long preoccupied Pre-Columbianists, yet… Full Review
October 21, 2009
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Michael Schreffler
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. 208 pp.; 24 color ills.; 39 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780271029832)
“There could be no lord without vassals, nor vassals without a lord.” Penned in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias, this deceptively simple sentence serves well to summarize the central argument of Michael Schreffler’s The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. Departing from recent studies that have interpreted seventeenth-century Mexican artworks as expressions of an emergent Creole patriotism, Schreffler offers an enlightening discussion of a series of secular images that reasserted the vicarious presence of the Spanish King in colonial Mexico. These images, Schreffler argues, embodied the sense of mutual dependence that existed in… Full Review
October 15, 2009
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Patrick R. McNaughton
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 328 pp.; 24 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (9780253219848)
Sidi Ballo’s masterful performance on a June night in Mali in 1978 was for Patrick McNaughton “a galvanizing event” whose memory stayed with him for three decades and inspired his writing of this book. As he so aptly notes, not all Malian masquerade performers are created equal. I share with him that sentiment. I know from my own work in Mali that it is only a rare and exceptional artist whose performance reveals the full power of the masquerade and whose virtuosity can so decisively imprint its memory on those who experience it. McNaughton skillfully sets the scene in… Full Review
October 13, 2009
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Joshua Shannon
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 232 pp.; 48 color ills.; 141 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300137064)
Rhetorically, New York City has long wielded artistic agency in postwar art. For instance, the metropolis apparently stole the idea of modern art away from Paris (according to Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]) and subsequently named its own school of painters (The New York School). Despite this centrality, however, few scholars have rigorously investigated the complex interactions between artists and the city itself. In The Disappearance of Objects, Joshua Shannon tackles precisely this issue as it transpired in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s… Full Review
September 30, 2009
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Carlos Basualdo, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven and Philadelphia : Yale University Press in association with Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009. 240 pp.; 120 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9780300149814)
Exhibition schedule: United States Pavilion at the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Organizing institution: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Exhibition Curators: Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor. June 7–November 22, 2009. A portion of the exhibition will be traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art: November 21, 2009–April 4, 2010.
Bruce Nauman’s masterful Topological Gardens, which was the United States entry in the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia, not surprisingly won the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion. Breaking from most previous U.S. exhibitions at the biennale, Nauman’s amounts to a not-so-mini-survey and is spread, also uncharacteristically, over three venues—the United States Pavilion in the Giardini, the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Università Ca’ Foscari, the latter two being the sites, respectively, of Days and Giorni, a pair of new sound installations. Also at Ca' Foscari is Untitled (1970/2009), a videotaped re-interpretation… Full Review
September 29, 2009
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Carole Paul
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 358 pp.; 24 color ills.; 104 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9780754661344)
Carole Paul’s The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour is an analysis of the shifting attitudes toward collection and display—form, content, and contexts—in the world of Settecento Rome. With a focus on the Borghese’s Galleria Terrena, the suites where most of the family’s paintings hung, and the Casino Nobile, home to the sculptures, Paul examines the interrelated narratives of aristocratic patronage, grand tour sociability, the international aesthetic landscape, and the development of museums. Her arguments rest on a detailed reading of the redesign of the Borghese galleries under Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV… Full Review
September 23, 2009
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Celeste-Marie Bernier
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 320 pp.; 16 color ills. Paper $24.95 (9780807859339)
In the introduction to African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present, Celeste-Marie Bernier positions her study in relation to a widely recognized problem within African American art history and criticism: In my view, far too many critics celebrate African American artists solely for their ability to survive political disenfranchisement, racist brutality and cultural annihilation, rather than for the ground-breaking formal qualities and aesthetic properties of their art. Traditionally in African American art criticism, artistic issues have been discounted in favour of their sociological, biographical and historical implications. Similarly, attempts by scholars to define a black… Full Review
September 23, 2009
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Exhibition schedule: MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, October 19, 2008–March 1, 2009
For this exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, assembled over 130 works by more than 100 artists to present the first large-scale exhibition of artists’ books in Los Angeles since 1978. But To Illustrate and Multiply was not a historical survey of artists’ books. Despite the expanse of works included, the exhibition was decidedly contemporary in scope—the earliest book on view was Ray Johnson’s The Paper Snake from 1965, and many of the books presented were created even more recently. This is not to say that the exhibition failed to provide an important perspective onto the history… Full Review
September 23, 2009
Mark Rosenthal, ed.
Exh. cat. San Francisco, West Palm Beach, and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 264 pp.; 297 color ills. Cloth and DVD $50.00 (9780300150483)
Exhibition schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 14–May 31, 2009; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, July 11–September 27, 2009; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, November 7, 2009–January 17, 2010; Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 28–May 17, 2010; Albertina, Vienna, October 30, 2010–January 30, 2011; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, March 5–May 29, 2011; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, July 7–October 2, 2011
So often our preliminary encounter with an exhibition sets our expectations and attitude about the work. This is particularly true for shows where that initial encounter occurs prior to actually seeing the art. My introduction to William Kentridge: Five Themes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was very much influenced by hearing muffled music as I walked through the galleries of works on paper that were part of the exhibition’s first section, “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio.” Haunting and somewhat melodramatic, the alluring sound (by Phillip Miller) materialized as accompaniment to Kentridge’s multi-screen installation, 7 Fragments for… Full Review
September 16, 2009
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