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

Bertrand Tillier and et al.
Exh. cat. Ostfildern-Ruit and New York: Hatje Cantz Verlag and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. 480 pp.; 470 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9783775721097)
Exhibition schedule: Grand Palais, Paris, October 13, 2007–January 28, 2008; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 27–May 18, 2008; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, June 13–September 28, 2008
Looming before the visitor entering the recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an enlargement of the artist’s striking The Desperate Man (1844–45), an image effectively representative of the artist’s intense effort to secure artistic fame without sacrificing his personal vision. Once inside the exhibition, the paintings themselves provided the chief drama in a curatorial endeavor that “sought to relocate Courbet’s work in the context of his time” instead of “attempting to formulate new hypotheses” (15). Organized thematically in roughly chronological order, Gustave Courbet began with the early role-playing self-portraits and ended with works produced during… Full Review
January 20, 2009
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Janet W. Foster
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006. 240 pp.; 231 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780810930858)
There is much to appreciate in Janet W. Foster’s The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular. First among these is the broad focus in her celebration of American residential architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which encompasses buildings across the country in a variety of geographic and social circumstances. Foster’s celebration is amply documented in the high graphic quality of this publication, particularly in the many full-page color photographs by Radek Kurzaj that lavishly present all of the twenty-two properties chosen for the catalogue portion of her project. One of the virtues of the… Full Review
January 14, 2009
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Tracy Miller
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. 265 pp.; 40 color ills.; 22 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780674021534)
The Memorial Shrines ritual complex of Jinci in Shanxi province is located at a sacred site where three mountain springs emerge to sustain the surrounding land and people. The Jinci complex is examined in The Divine Nature of Power through multiple methodological perspectives stemming from modern fields of archaeology; anthropology; art and architectural history; and political, social, and religious history. Through a careful reading and interpretation of surviving textual and physical materials, Miller reconstructs part of the complicated cultural history of this ritual complex. She uses a female water spirit of the Jin Springs and the historical/mythical figure of Shu… Full Review
January 14, 2009
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Karen Lang
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 304 pp.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (9780801488559)
Philippe-Alain Michaud
Trans Sophie Hawkes New York: Zone Books, 2004. 404 pp.; 100 ills. Cloth $37.95 (9781890951399)
In 1886, the twenty-year old Aby Warburg, scion of the Hamburg banking family, began to keep records of his book purchases. In the same year, he enrolled as a student at the University of Bonn to study art history, archaeology, classical mythology, and the philosophy of history. He spent 1888–89 in Florence, assisting August Schmarsow in the founding of a German art-historical institute. Apart from a subsequent stint at the University of Strassburg, he spent most of his life as a private scholar in Hamburg, with the exception of a long journey to the United States and specifically to the… Full Review
January 14, 2009
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Paul Rehak
Ed John G Younger Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 288 pp.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0299220109)
Paul Rehak’s Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius was unfinished at the time of the author’s lamentably premature death in 2004. The manuscript was subsequently prepared for publication by his longtime partner and colleague at the University of Kansas, John Younger. In its present version, the book offers a concise study of the major Augustan monuments of the northern Campus Martius in Rome, particularly the Mausoleum, the Ustrinum (cremation site) of Augustus, the Solarium (sun calendar), and the Ara Pacis, the emperor’s famous altar of Peace. It advances the thesis that this part of the city was… Full Review
January 7, 2009
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Charlene Villaseñor Black
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 272 pp.; 8 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth $67.50 (9780691096315)
Charlene Villaseñor Black’s Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph is a long overdue examination of the social and cultural functions of images of Saint Joseph in Baroque Spain and Mexico. As the author herself reminds us, “Hispanists have long been engaged in recovering archival documents, producing monographic studies, and documenting artistic patronage. . . . Whereas Spanish court art, mythology, still life, and collecting have been explored in depth, less scholarly attention has been directed to the thousands of Madonnas, Crucifixions, saints and martyrs represented in Spain and the Americas” (14). This lack of attention to religious subjects in Hispanic… Full Review
January 7, 2009
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J. M. Mancini
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 256 pp.; 75 b/w ills. $45.00 (9780691118130)
“Pre-modernism” as a term may not become standard usage; its multiple meanings quickly become unmanageable: a phase that comes before modernism temporally, predating its practices and assumptions; modernism avant la lettre, suggesting a longer historical genesis; and modernism not as something historically specific but instead a matter of certain structural relations between artists, critics, discourses, and audiences. “Pre-modernism” also raises a number of questions. Does modernism refer to a style—a specific artistic language? Or to a set of ideological assumptions about the relationship of the aesthetic to the social and cultural realms? Or to a particular critical tradition that… Full Review
December 31, 2008
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Krista de Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym, eds.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. 436 pp.; 342 b/w ills. Paper $130.00 (9782503513669)
This ambitious, multi-authored volume brings to fruition nearly ten years of academic effort. The two editors, who are in fact responsible for over two-thirds of the book, set out to question and, ultimately, to discredit a deeply entrenched set of scholarly habits. They argue persuasively that there can be no rigid division between “Dutch” and “Flemish” architecture in the early modern period. As Konrad Ottenheym demonstrates in an impassioned introduction, such a division was only imposed in the nineteenth century, when scholars serving the new states of Belgium and the Kingdom of the Netherlands dutifully invented national architectural traditions. This… Full Review
December 31, 2008
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Nancy Spector, Michael Archer, and et al.
New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008. 256 pp.; 85 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892073771)
Exhibition schedule: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 24, 2008–January 7, 2009
theanyspacewhatever is an exhibition that aims to provide a retrospective view on a range of artistic practices that emerged in the 1990s. What unites these practices, regardless of the different stylistic and aesthetic strategies they employ, is the way they turn the idea of an art exhibition into a dynamic medium of sociability and collaboration. To exemplify this practice, Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, invited ten contemporary artists to collectively formulate a group exhibition for the museum. The artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—are… Full Review
December 30, 2008
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Julia Meech and Jane Oliver, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Asia Society and Japanese Art Society of America in association with University of Washington Press, 2008. 256 pp.; 200 color ills. Paper $45.00 (9780295987866)
Exhibition schedule: Asia Society and Museum, New York, February 27–May 4, 2008
Designed for Pleasure is a visually beautiful exhibition catalogue and a great source of information concerning Japanese woodblock prints and books, Japanese paintings of the “floating world,” and the various cultures that commissioned, created, and enjoyed such works. The catalogue documents the 2008 Asia Society exhibition of the same name, which was a highly anticipated event as a result of the curators seeking out the very best works available from private and public collections in the United States. To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese Art Society of America, founded in 1973 as the Ukiyo-e Society of America, the… Full Review
December 24, 2008
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Anthony J. Barbieri-Low
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. 400 pp.; 44 color ills.; 67 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295987132)
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low’s book is more far-reaching than its title initially suggests. It is not just about the artisans of early imperial China (the Qin and Han dynasties), but as he explains in his introduction/first chapter: “Understanding these lives [of the artisans] and the complex social, commercial and technological networks in which they participated will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past” (17). In the following five chapters, Barbieri-Low examines artisans in the following contexts: society, the workshop, the marketplace, at court, and in irons (the slave). His thorough and meticulously documented exploration of the milieu in… Full Review
December 17, 2008
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Mary Ann Calo
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 280 pp. Paper $29.95 (9780472032303)
Whether it is called the fruit of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Negro Renaissance, or of the New Negro Movement, the art produced by African Americans in the interwar decades of the twentieth century has long fascinated audiences hungry for celebratory and affirming representations of and by blacks. Handsome genre portraits, poignant scenes of cities and rural landscapes, tough realist sculpture, and modernist tableaus are oft-exhibited and oft-reproduced subjects in the United States, and increasingly, abroad. James Van Der Zee’s studio photographs, Aaron Douglas’s Egyptian hieroglyph-meets-Art Deco paintings, and Palmer Hayden’s still-life Fetiche et Fleurs (1936) number among the most… Full Review
December 17, 2008
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Judith Oliver
Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. 384 pp.; 44 color ills.; 124 b/w ills. Cloth $174.00 (9782503516806)
“The venerable and pious virgin Gisela von Kerssenbrock wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated, and decorated this admirable book with golden letters and beautiful images in her memory. In the year of our Lord 1300 her soul rested in peace. Amen.” This extraordinary inscription has given the elaborate Gradual typically referred to as the Codex Gisle a special place in the history of medieval German art and of manuscript illumination in general. The fact that it names the nun Gisela as responsible for all aspects of the making of the book has been used, in recent years, to give the manuscript… Full Review
December 17, 2008
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Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, eds.
Exh. cat. San Francisco and Berkeley: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with University of California Press, 2008. 176 pp.; 95 color ills.; 12 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780520258648)
Exhibition schedule: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 25, 2008–January 18, 2009; Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY, February 18–August 23, 2009
“Forty years ago there were no Asian Americans,” reads the provocative first sentence of Gordon H. Chang and Mark Dean Johnson’s introduction to the catalogue for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970. It seems that until the first recorded use of “Asian American” at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, the terms for Americans of Asian ancestry were either “Orientals” or more ethnic-specific descriptors. As early as 1896—eight years before the birth of Isamu Noguchi in Los Angeles—Asian American artists began clustering into art associations like the Southern California Japanese Art… Full Review
December 17, 2008
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Jason Edwards
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. 282 pp.; 97 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (0754608611)
Elizabeth Prettejohn
New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007. 320 pp.; 40 color ills.; 85 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300135497)
Both Jason Edwards’s Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting exemplify newer methodological approaches in Victorian art, a blend of the intertextual and historical, and each superbly succeeds in diverse ways. Edwards's book challenges preexisting assumptions that Aestheticism did not embrace the realm of sculpture and reinscribes the question dramatically. Past scholars have focused on poetry and novels, popular culture, paintings, decorative objects, and even architecture, but not how sculpture also contributed to the phenomenon of art for art's sake and the cult of the… Full Review
December 10, 2008
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