Recently Published Reviews

In 2006, Tate Britain, in collaboration with the Louvre, organized a major exhibition of William Hogarth’s work which travelled to Paris and Barcelona. The exhibition was a hit at the Tate, but its success in drawing both crowds and critical attention to this canonically English artist among continental audiences was unprecedented. Co-curators Mark Hallett and Christine Riding’s accompanying catalogue, Hogarth, reflects the dual purpose of many Tate catalogues, providing a summa of recent research in the fertile field of Hogarth studies for academically inclined readers, while serving as an accessible introduction to the artist for a wider audience, including… Full Review

In an unpublished 1966 lecture on the centennial of Aby Warburg’s birth, Max Adolph, Aby’s only son and at one time his designated successor as director of the Warburg Library, remarked that his father had embodied like no other the virtue Chancellor Bismarck sorely missed in his fellow citizens, namely, Zivilcourage: “Had there been more Germans like this German Jew, we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism and our second war.” The chief merit of Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, first published in Germany in 1998, is to have drawn renewed attention to this side of Warburg’s… Full Review

Margaret Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe is a collection of six studies of familiar and lesser-known masterworks by Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, and Otto van Schrieck. The author skillfully elicits the various political aspects of these works, in terms of gender relations, marriage, social relations, governance, and philosophy; and does so for art objects spanning three centuries, made under and for widely differing circumstances. This range is one measure of Carroll’s erudition. Another is the tools she brings to this complex task: skill in locating the apt source in classical or Renaissance… Full Review

In this rich and complex book, a senior scholar in the field of Franciscan textual studies draws together the leading currents of scholarship on the history of Saint Francis and the earliest decades of the order he founded, fusing studies on visual images and relics with those on lives of the saint, stories of his miracles, and versions of his rhythmical feast, i.e., the text and music devised for his liturgical celebration. In the process Rosalind Brooke provides extensive analysis of large panel images of the saint with scenes of his life and miracles, as well as the frescoes and… Full Review

The American architectural educator Joseph Hudnut (1886–1968) lived long enough to know the place he would occupy in history: the man who brought Walter Gropius to Harvard. The founding dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) had indeed recruited the creator of the Bauhaus to head the school’s department of architecture in 1937 as part of his own crusade to wipe out Beaux-Arts methods in the United States. By the time both men retired in the 1950s, they had long been at odds. Yet the “recruiter” role was a logical one for Hudnut in a historiography where the… Full Review

In January 1902, the German art dealer Paul Cassirer, a major proponent of Berlin Secession artists, as well as the conduit through which French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism gained currency in Germany, presented a show at his Berlin gallery (Galerie Paul Cassirer) in which he juxtaposed two highly original yet antithetical artists. Both artists were rather unknown at the time, but one-half of this visionary curatorial diptych would become a household name, instantly recognizable for his bold colors, thick brushwork, and troubled life. The other artist would gain little recognition and appreciation outside of the German-speaking world for much of his… Full Review

Among contemporary art ceramists and potters in various countries, there are few who are unfamiliar with the ceramics technique known as “raku.” This method of custom-firing pieces at low temperatures gained popularity in Europe and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, and today raku kilns are a common fixture at university and art-school ceramics programs around the world. While most makers of raku ceramics are aware that “raku” is a term that originated in Japan, they use the firing technique in ways that owe little to Asian traditions. As a result, Western raku bears faint… Full Review

Multi-authored volumes seem to be rather difficult to publish these days, and yet they can be among the most important resources for scholars and students alike. The Artist as Professional in Japan is one such volume. The series of essays in this book consists of individual case studies, ranging in time from the seventh century to the twentieth, and covering the fields of sculpture, painting, pottery, printmaking, and architecture. The authors tackle a variety of questions pertinent to the idea of artist as professional: How did producers of art conduct their business? How did they learn their art and/or become… Full Review

In her recent career survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Tara Donovan creates ethereal, environmental sculptures out of such banal, everyday objects as toothpicks, Scotch tape, Mylar, and plastic cups. Working with one material at a time, and testing the range of its physical properties, Donovan subverts the utilitarian function of an object through a process of accumulation. In the seventeen works on view from the past decade, she stacks, piles, or otherwise masses her material to explore its latent sculptural capabilities, all the while turning mundane matter into the stuff of high art. When I… Full Review

In almost every sense, the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and the accompanying catalogue are retrospective. First, they include many objects that were acquired by collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century, during an earlier period of interest in the history of private life. Second, they draw upon and summarize four recent decades of historical and art-historical scholarship focused on the family life of Renaissance Italians and the material objects that accompanied them through its various stages. Finally, they look back at those Renaissance Italians themselves and try to explain how they understood love (both sacred and… Full Review

Vézelay, with its astonishing triple portal, luminous interior, and exquisitely carved, inventive capitals is a monument that all historians of medieval art must address at some point in their careers, whether as students, teachers, or researchers. It is a challenging and difficult subject. In The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay, Kirk Ambrose offers a reconsideration of the 135 nave capitals, less studied than the portal sculpture in part because of the problems they pose. The capitals vividly represent subjects from the Old Testament, saints’ lives, and classical poetry, but many subjects cannot be firmly identified. Furthermore, for all the care… Full Review

Elizabeth Saxon’s The Eucharist in Romanesque France is strikingly ambitious. A study of eucharistic theology and devotion in eleventh- and twelfth-century “France” (up to approximately 1160), it simultaneously aspires to be a survey, in the spirit of Emile Mâle’s great overviews, of relevant contemporary iconography—drawn primarily from monumental sculpture, in Saxon’s case, but also on occasion from frescoes and manuscript illumination. As Saxon states in her introduction, her aim is “to juxtapose aspects of the multi-faceted penitential-eucharistic devotion, as revealed in theological writings and Mass commentaries, in Gregorian reform, in heretical circles both clerical and popular and in works of… Full Review

The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the catalogue essays are all of permanent importance and will be required reading for those interested in Japanese art history. The catalogue begins with an essay entitled "Patriarchs Heading West: An Introduction," written by the exhibition’s curators, Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit. In it, they offer historiographical observations and delineate some of the interpretative methodologies that will be developed in the… Full Review

Many art historians are familiar with the work produced in India during the period of Mughal rule (1526–1857). All surveys of world art illustrate the Taj Mahal, the stunning tomb commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife on the bank of the Yamuna River at Agra. Most surveys also include pages from the magnificent albums compiled for the Mughals, whether intricate scenes of court receptions with splendid arrays of bejeweled courtiers or stunning studies of individual animals and birds. (Those interested can see some of these album pages in the exhibition currently traveling around the United States or… Full Review

Annabel Wharton’s Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks is the biography by proxy of a sacred site. It chronicles not the possession of Jerusalem via military conquest or pilgrimage, but rather the smaller-scale possession of proxies for it, the acquisition and construction of a series of surrogates for this most famously contested of holy sites. Following twists and turns of history from the early Christian period to the present, Wharton studies the ways in which proxies for the city have been sold. She also argues that these different iterations of Jerusalem have intersected with moments in what we might call… Full Review