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

Hermann Schlimme, ed.
Milan: Electa, 2006. 314 pp.; 36 color ills.; 300 b/w ills. Cloth €75.00 (8837042361)
This edited volume is the initial product of a joint research project undertaken by scholars at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The “Epistemic History of Architecture” aims to promote a series of conferences on the theme of architecture as a historical form of “knowledge.” The group’s primary object of study is not the building itself but rather the process of construction, which is understood to incorporate implicit and explicit “systems” of knowledge, ranging from practitioners’ rules-of-thumb to codified theory in all its… Full Review
September 9, 2008
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Sarah Schroth and Ronni Baer, eds.
Exh. cat. London: Thames and Hudson, 2008. 352 pp.; 160 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780878467266)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 20–July 27, 2008; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, August 21–November 9, 2008
The beautifully produced catalogue of the exhibition that opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will have its second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is devoted to the re-evaluation of the art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, making known to a wider public the work of artists that preceded the great flowering of Spanish painting in its Golden Age, specifically during the period between the death of Philip III’s father, at the end of the sixteenth century, and the accession to the throne of his son, Philip IV, in 1621… Full Review
September 3, 2008
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Marjorie Trusted
University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press in association with Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007. 256 pp.; 167 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Paper $47.50 (9780271033372)
This is an excellent book. Its virtues are that it offers an overview of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and luxury arts of Iberia; furthermore, it is highly reliable. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it contains a trustworthy list of existing publications on Spanish and Portuguese art, a list that registers the history of Iberia with depth and balanced judgment. For example, Trusted does not carelessly assert that in the sixteenth century Muslims fled Spain for the Americas, where they created Islamic-derived ceilings, tiles, leather hangings, and carpets. Instead she wisely notes that the artists who created these items may… Full Review
September 3, 2008
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Julian Brooks
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. 144 pp.; 95 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780892369027)
Federico Zuccaro documented the troubled early life, apprenticeships, and rise to fame of his older brother, Taddeo, in a series of twenty drawings acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 from Christie’s New York. An exhibition of these drawings, created in the 1590s, coincided with the publication of this book in which the drawings and accompanying poems are illustrated and placed in the historical and artistic context of sixteenth-century Rome. Two major themes recur throughout the volume. One is the prominence of not only Taddeo (1529–1566) as a central player among Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in… Full Review
August 26, 2008
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Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, eds.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 566 pp.; 239 b/w ills. Paper $49.95 (9781405105620)
There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts' formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . .), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . .). Let's try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the… Full Review
August 26, 2008
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Patricia J. Graham
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 368 pp.; 46 color ills.; 111 b/w ills. Paper $55.00 (9780824831912)
There are far too few general books available on topics in Japanese art, and those who are intrepid enough to write them are insufficiently applauded for the difficult task. Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 is an excellent example of an overview of Japanese Buddhist art done exceedingly well. It does a laudable job of surveying Japanese Buddhist arts from the early modern period continuing into the present, discussing an important body of visual materials that until now has been largely overlooked. The intention of the book, Patricia Graham states, is to “suggest new directions for research and… Full Review
August 25, 2008
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Kim Brandt
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 320 pp.; 21 b/w ills. Paper $23.95 (9780822340003)
Scholarly texts, from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) to Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), have played a pivotal role in theorizing culture, and specifically art, as a means by which to withstand and overcome the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernity in the West. In the past decade, the field of East Asian Studies has found itself undergoing a much-needed methodological shift whereby the intersection between culture, the economy, and nationalist politics is carefully analyzed. Through works that weave historical narratives with critical theory, such as Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity… Full Review
August 25, 2008
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Charles Davis and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi
Exh. cat. Florence: Giunti, 2008. 406 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Cloth Euros45.00 (9788809059023)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, April 16–September 7, 2008
Although most of his works normally reside in Florentine museums and his role as a proponent of the maniera in sculpture is well-known, Vincenzo Danti (1530–76) is finally being feted with an exhibition of his own. On view at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence through September 7, I grandi bronzi del Battistero: L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo is the schizophrenic title for what is essentially a monographic show on the career of the artist. Its occasion is the restoration of a three-figure bronze group from the southern door of the Florentine Baptistery, but the show and… Full Review
August 20, 2008
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Elizabeth Carpenter, ed.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis: 320 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780935640885)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, February 20–May 18, 2008; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 14–September 16, 2008
The current, straightforwardly titled Frida Kahlo retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center and traveling to Philadelphia and San Francisco, follows two unrelated but identically titled surveys of the same artist—one organized by the Tate Modern (2005) and another, more hastily put together, at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2007), each with unique, well-illustrated catalogues. While the shows in Mexico and the United States were explicitly tied to the centennial of Kahlo’s 1907 birth, the Tate version seems to have been conceptualized as the best way to get British audiences excited about Latin American art… Full Review
August 20, 2008
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Elizabeth Lillehoj, ed.
Warren, Conn.: Floating World Editions, 2007. 208 pp.; 64 b/w ills. Paper (9781891640506)
This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was… Full Review
August 19, 2008
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Lorraine Daston, ed.
New York: Zone Books, 2004. 456 pp.; 8 color ills.; 73 b/w ills. Paper $21.95 (1890951439)
Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively… Full Review
August 13, 2008
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Robert Conway
Exh. cat. Washington, DC and Boston: Trust for Museum Exhibitions in association with Boston Public Library, 2007. 159 pp.; 73 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9781882507177)
Exhibition schedule: Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh, April 21–June 17, 2007; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; July 12–September 23, 2007; Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando; October 11–December 23, 2007; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; January 10–March 23, 2008; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; April 10–June 1, 2008; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, June 21–August 31, 2008; Boston Public Library, Boston, September 22–December 1, 2008
Enthusiasts of early twentieth-century American art have long recognized George Bellows’s facility for powerful draftsmanship, yet his energetic, even boisterous, paintings and lithographs remain appreciably better known than his drawings. The artist made hundreds of original works on paper, largely black and white, now hidden in museums and private collections across the country. Their broad dispersal may account, in part, for the limited scholarly attention paid this fascinating aspect of the artist’s work. The exhibition The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library begins to redress this lacuna by showcasing works from one of the key… Full Review
August 13, 2008
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Roberta Panzanelli, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. 200 pp.; 166 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $49.95 (9780892369181)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, March 6–June 23, 2008
First, a disclaimer. Throughout my art-history education, which began in the 1960s and was probably typical, pre-twentieth-century sculpture was evaluated much as it had been since the Renaissance, which is to say in formal terms, the purity of its planes and contours competing with painting’s reliance on surface and color. I came to know, at least intellectually, that perceptions and judgments are indelibly affected by the conventions and values of our time, and assumed that, in the objective spirit in which art historians are taught to approach works of art, I would adjust gracefully to new evidence requiring shifts in… Full Review
August 13, 2008
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Maria H. Loh
Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007. 272 pp.; 24 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892368730)
Peter Humphrey
Bruges: Ludion, 2007. 408 pp.; 400 color ills. Cloth $150.00 (9780810994096)
These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries)… Full Review
August 12, 2008
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Sarah D. Coffin, Gail S. Davidson, Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, and Ellen Lupton
Exh. cat. New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Assouline, 2008. 272 pp.; 380+ color ills. Paper $45.00 (9780910503914)
Exhibition schedule: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, March 7–July 6, 2008
The curators of Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008 have gathered an impressive collection of well-known objects from Europe and the United States to showcase the curving beauty of the eighteenth-century Rococo and of later designs with similarly sinuous lines. The show was mounted by members of the Cooper-Hewitt curatorial staff, including Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, and Ellen Lupton, with Penelope Hunter-Stiebel as a guest curator. The focus is on the formal elements of the Rococo, demonstrating the historical persistence of sculptural curves across media and through space and time. The exhibition consists of a roughly chronological display of… Full Review
August 6, 2008
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