Recently Published Reviews

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

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

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

“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

“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

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

Books on museums certainly keep coming. The historian Randolph Starn rightly noted in 2005 that the phenomenon of museology had burgeoned in little more than a decade, and the problem was now “how to navigate a flood of literature” (“A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 [February 2005]: 68). Andrew McClellan, whose Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) immediately became a bulwark of the new, historically robust study of museums as institutions, remarked in 2007 that museum… Full Review

François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal by Estelle Lingo is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, intelligently constructed, and handsomely presented. Lingo’s close attention to technique and what she refers to as “bodily presence” (an essential element in the Greek ideal) call for the highest quality pictures, which by and large she gets. Given Lingo’s gifts with ekphrasis, the excellent visual documentation, and her no-stone-unturned approach to investigating modern and early modern sources and documents relating to Duquesnoy and the Greek question, this book serves as a kind of laboratory in which the author attempts to distill the essence of the Greek… Full Review

While standard textbooks on Greek temples are organized according to chronology and building type, the two titles under review here attempt to render Greek architecture more accessible and more relevant to contemporary readers. Tony Spawforth’s discussion of Greek peripteral temples stresses the experiential aspect and endeavors to facilitate the study of these structures by, among other things, updating the vocabulary used to describe them. His text is intended as an introduction to the subject, and is thus copiously illustrated (mostly in color) and conveniently divided up into short sections. Alexander Tzonis and Phoebe Giannisi, on the other hand, assume a… Full Review

Dario Gamboni has a keen eye for significant art-historical projects. In his earlier book with Reaktion, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (1997), he addressed a topical theme—art vandalism—with a high degree of historical nuance and depth. Potential Images shares these qualities. Gamboni examines a phenomenon with which both art historians and more casual viewers of the visual arts are familiar: the intriguing if evanescent tendency to see what we construe as hidden or ambiguous images in works of art and decorative schemes. Citing Marcel Duchamp’s view that “it is the ONLOOKER who makes these… Full Review

The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future of the discipline of art history. A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, one of the first volumes to appear in the series Blackwell Companions to Art History, is the middle installment of three essay collections that will treat the state of research on the art of the Christian Middle Ages. The collection covers the period ca. 1000–1300 in northern… Full Review

The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvre expands yearly as, for example, with these two small books on two of Wright’s smaller Usonian houses. The residential component of Wright’s vision for a redesigned United States of North America, Usonians were built across the country in the last two decades of the architect’s long career. They would be enormously influential on American housing design for the remainder of the twentieth century. The books under review take very different approaches, but share a focus on individual Usonian houses and the story of their making. The Sidney and Mildred Rosenbaum House was… Full Review

Visually stunning and intellectually riveting, the exhibition Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentieth-Century Japan presented the Honolulu Academy of Arts's newly acquired Terry Welch Collection of over eighty Japanese ceramics, calligraphy, and paintings (in handscroll, hanging scroll, album, and both two- and six-panel screen formats) from late Edo through Showa periods (the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries). It demonstrated the claim—made by guest curator Michiyo Morioka and other panelists in the accompanying symposium—that unlike most schools of Japanese art (Kano-ha, Tosa-ha, Rinpa), Bunjinga (“literati painting”) is not determined by a single style, but rather encompasses a very… Full Review

In philosophy we have important dialogues by Plato, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume. A dialogue is a great format for presenting opposed points of view, without requiring that the author choose between them. But in art history, apart from some staged scenes in Diderot’s Salons, Mondrian’s dialogues, and Roberto Longhi’s short imagined discussion between Caravaggio and Tiepolo, it’s hard to cite examples of this literary form. (There were some French dialogues preceding modernism, and of course Andy Warhol contributed to that tradition in one of his dictated books.) I’ve always been a little surprised that we art historians have… Full Review

Amilcare Iannucci, whose death in 2007 robbed us of a creative and prolific scholar devoted to the study of Dante’s reception, often emphasized the “producerly influence” of Dante’s literary art, especially his Divine Comedy, in his extensive scholarship on the subject. In the introduction to Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which he edited, Iannucci explains: “The Commedia produced not only a philological response [i.e., commentaries and scholarly interpretive works] . . . but also a creative response. It inspired the production of other objects, independent of its structure, in both the artistic and literary spheres”… Full Review