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

Ian Jenkins
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press in association with British Museum Press, 2007. 272 pp.; 100 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780674023888)
No other museum in the world can match the British Museum for its incomparable collection of ancient Greek architectural sculpture. While the Elgin Marbles are its best known acquisition, it also showcases sculpture from two of the “wonders” of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, as well as that of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and the Nereid Monument from Lycia. And who better to assemble and analyze these famous and influential monuments in a single volume than Ian Jenkins, who has been on the curatorial staff of the British Museum… Full Review
May 26, 2009
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Christopher S. Wood
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 416 pp.; 116 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780226905976)
For art historians a seemingly incongruous incident can sometimes trigger fresh thinking about what had seemed a familiar historical landscape. Such was the impetus for this study by Christopher Wood: a curious, late fifteenth-century case of apparently bungled connoisseurship. When Conrad Celtis, the celebrated German poet laureate, historian, and antiquarian, discovered a group of over-life-sized sculptures of draped, bearded men at a monastery in the wilderness near Regensburg, he published his find as representations of ancient Druid priests. Druids, however, were never a presence in Germany, and Celtis must have known that these sculptures actually represented medieval Christian apostles and… Full Review
May 20, 2009
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Mia M. Mochizuki
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 424 pp.; 158 color ills.; 61 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9780754661047)
In the opening sentence of her book, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, Mia Mochizuki reminds us that we often see what we expect to see; consequently, we often readily overlook the unexpected, even when it is right in front of us. The decoration of Dutch Reformed churches, for instance, is typically viewed merely in terms of iconoclastic negation, leaving existing Protestant imagery unnoticed. Although numerous Catholic objects were destroyed in the Protestant war against idols, this did not stop Calvinists from generating new ecclesiastical images, ones that they could call their… Full Review
May 20, 2009
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Michaela Giebelhausen
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. 270 pp.; 13 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth $120.00 (9780754630746)
In Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Michaela Giebelhausen charts the transformations of religious painting and the “troubled emergence of a unique form of naturalistic religious painting” (2) between the 1840s and the 1860s. Her analysis draws on two types of Victorian text: theories of history painting and biblical criticism. Both were marked by substantial controversies in the decades under investigation and ultimately circled around one unsettling question: What is the nature and reality of the divine? At stake was the very essence of Christianity, and the debates were accordingly fierce. In the battle over the… Full Review
May 20, 2009
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Terese Tse Bartholomew and John Johnston
Exh. cat. Honolulu and Chicago: Honolulu Academy of Arts and Kingdom of Bhutan in association with Serindia Publications, 2008. 480 pp.; 300 color ills. Paper $45.95 (9781932476361)
Exhibition Schedule: Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, February 23–May 23, 2008; Rubin Museum, New York, September 19, 2008–January 5, 2009; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, February 20–May 10, 2009; Musee Guimet, Paris, October 6, 2009–January 25, 2010; Museum of East Asian Art, Cologne, February 19–May 23, 2010; Museum Rietberg, Zurich, July 4–October 17, 2010
The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review
May 13, 2009
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Eva Meyer-Hermann, ed.
Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Stockholm, Pittsburgh, and Rotterdam: Stedelijk Museum, Moderna Museet, and Andy Warhol Museum in association with NAi Publishers, 2008. 176 pp.; many color ills. Paper $50.00 (9789056626754)
Exhibition schedule: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 12, 2007–January 13, 2008; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February 9–May 4, 2008; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, September 13, 2008–February 15, 2009; The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London, October 7, 2008–January 18, 2009
Exhibition schedule: Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, September 27, 2008–January 4, 2009; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, NY, February 15–April 26, 2009
This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review
May 13, 2009
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Barbara Thompson, ed.
Exh. cat. Hanover, N.H. and Seattle: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College in association with University of Washington Press, 2008. 376 pp.; 212 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paper $50.00 (9780295987712)
Exhibition schedule: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, April 1–August 10, 2008; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, September 10–December 10, 2008; San Diego Museum of Art, January 31–April 26, 2009
Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body was an attractive and smart show. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, its second venue of three, offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony where Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache—a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire—was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation… Full Review
May 12, 2009
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Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 456 pp.; 77 b/w ills. Paper $27.95 (9780822342038)
How should we identify our period style? Twenty years ago, that question would have been easy to answer: we are postmodernists. But these days postmodernism is finished—whether because too many competing commentators killed the concept, or because it was too closely linked to modernism, or because we in the early twenty-first century require our own period style. And so the goal of the sequence of essays given at a University of Pittsburgh-sponsored conference during the 2004 Carnegie International and collected in Antinomies of Art and Culture is to offer a way of identifying the characteristic features of art made today… Full Review
May 6, 2009
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Peter Saul, Robert Storr, Dan Cameron, and Michael Duncan
Exh. cat. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008. 160 pp.; 94 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9783775722049)
Exhibition schedule: Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, June 22–September 21, 2008; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, October 18, 2008–January 4, 2009; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, February 7–April 5, 2009
“I do like to hit the nerves,” painter Peter Saul confesses. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it when he does. In the past, whenever I encountered Saul’s paintings—unmistakable with their garish, artificially hot colors and repellant imagery—I quickly withdrew from this frontal assault on my sensibilities. As it turns out, I was shortchanging myself. I rescinded my snap judgments after seeing the first major U.S. survey of Saul’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest curator Dan Cameron. I caught up… Full Review
April 29, 2009
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Michiyo Morioka
Seattle: Blakemore Foundation in association with University of Washington Press, 2008. 200 pp.; 113 color ills.; 133 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780295987736)
Most historians of Japanese art are likely familiar with the generous exhibition and publication grants given by the Blakemore Foundation. Older print scholars and collectors may have shopped in the 1960s and 1970s at the Franell Gallery in Tokyo, or used the book Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints, published by Weatherhill in 1975. Some may have heard that the person behind these diverse enterprises was a woman named Frances Blakemore. Before the publication of Michiyo Morioka’s biography, however, it is unlikely that anyone knew much about the fascinating life and artistic career of Frances Wismer Baker Blakemore (1906–1997)… Full Review
April 28, 2009
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Pamela M. Jones
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 390 pp.; 16 color ills.; 90 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754661795)
Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its… Full Review
April 22, 2009
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Jonathan Lopez
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. 352 pp. Cloth $26.00 (9780151013418)
In 2001 the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered as the very last work in its large, enormously popular exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School a small painting of a young woman seated at a virginal (a keyboard instrument of the seventeenth century). Presented without fanfare by curator Walter Liedtke and not included in the catalogue, this picture was familiar to specialist scholars: as the final image in Lawrence Gowing’s seminal 1952 monograph on Vermeer, the work had claims to authenticity, but has since encountered doubts. On public view for the first time in half a century, this tiny work sparked… Full Review
April 22, 2009
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Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 304 pp.; 41 color ills.; 146 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780271032566)
Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona open their fascinating book on the Arena Chapel by citing both Dante’s famous description in the Inferno of the notorious usurer Reginaldo Scrovegni, and the epitaph from the tomb of his son Enrico (d. 1336), who was buried in the Arena Chapel—the chapel in which Giotto, commissioned by Enrico just after 1302, painted in fresco events from the lives of Anna, Joachim, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, along with a monumental Last Judgment. Derbes and Sandona highlight the radically different opinions offered by these two sources about the fate of usurers in the Scrovegni… Full Review
April 22, 2009
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Renato Miracco and Maria Christina Bandera, eds.
Exh. cat. Milan: Skira, 2008. 368 pp.; 255 color ills.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9788861307162)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 16–December 14, 2008; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, January 22–April 12, 2009
Giorgio Morandi, 1890–1964, co-organized by the Museo d’Arte Moderna of Bologna and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first comprehensive survey of Morandi’s work in the United States. The exhibition gathered 110 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings by the reserved, often elusive, and sometimes underappreciated Italian painter of still life and landscape. The curators, Maria Cristina Bandera, Director of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, and Renato Miracco, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, brought together a remarkable selection of works, drawn from both Italian and U.S. museums as well as private collections. There were… Full Review
April 15, 2009
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Julie Nelson Davis
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. 256 pp.; 66 color ills.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780824831998)
In the field of Japanese woodblock prints, monographs on single artists, as opposed to catalogues, by academically trained authors—rather than collectors or dealers—are still a relative novelty: Julie Nelson Davis’s is only the third, all appearing in the last decade. But hers has significantly raised the bar. Her study is meticulously researched and documented and has a clear and well-framed thesis and approach. She benefits, of course, from the superlative catalogue by Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark for the 1995 Utamaro retrospective at the British Museum (Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, London: British… Full Review
April 14, 2009
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