Recently Published Reviews

When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu… Full Review

Only seven years after their resplendent pioneering exhibition and catalogue on the seventeenth-century Japanese artist Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), Felice Fischer, Kyoko Kinoshita, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art produced an even more magnificent catalogue and exhibition on the artists Ike (also known as Ikeno and Ike no) Taiga (1723–76) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727/28–1784). Like Kōetsu, who was himself a calligrapher, potter, and lacquer-ware artist, Gyokuran and her husband Taiga were stylistic and social pioneers who worked in several arts, in their case painting, calligraphy, poetry, and even seal-carving and lacquer, in the style called Nanga. One of several… Full Review

What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end… Full Review

Perhaps most famous in art history as Antonio Moro, a name he assumed while portraitist for the Spanish court of King Philip II, Anthonis Mor enjoyed a long career in the Netherlands, chiefly around his native Utrecht. In this extensive analytical study, Joanna Woodall restores to the painter his full career, including a serious output of religious subjects. Indeed, Woodall’s perceptive characterizations sometimes seem colored by a portentous wish to convey the ultimate seriousness and salvific purpose of his vocation. If Christian content enjoys extensive attention here, it arose with Mor’s origins, for he was a “disciple” (Woodall’s word,… Full Review

Collectors, it sometimes seems, are a necessary evil. Artists create, and we art writers explain the significance of what they make. But collectors, who usually are privileged people, mostly only pick up the check. Too often they treat art as a form of speculation, and so are ready to resell when its value increases. And many of them are not shy about hustling for tips. As a dealer explained to me over dinner, after the newly rich purchase their houses and yacht, they come to his gallery to get their art. Well, they have to do something with their money… Full Review

El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts brings to light a period in Spanish art which, despite the quality of artistic production and the rich history of the period, has been overshadowed by the art produced during the reigns of Philip III’s father, Philip II, and son, Philip IV. Philip III reigned from 1598 to 1621; notably, neither El Greco nor Velázquez, the protagonists of this exhibition to judge by its title, lived at Philip’s court. El Greco had long been settled in Toledo (he died there… Full Review

Reviewing the Van Abbemuseum’s recent exhibition Forms of Resistance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 22, 2007–January 6, 2008), art historian and critic Hal Foster poses the questions, “What is the ‘social’ that ‘desires’ to be ‘changed,’ and how might ‘forms of resistance’ bear on this change? Do radical art and politics converge only at moments of crisis?” (Artforum XLVI, no. 4 [January 2008]: 273). How can we describe the relationship between political activism and the production of contemporary art? While of course there are no simple answers to these questions, editors Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette propose that the concept… Full Review

A curtain of clear plastic sleeves hangs in the shop window that serves as the façade to Ooga Booga’s main space. Inside each transparent pocket rests a simple, photocopied, and staple-bound book available for visitors to touch and flip through. In this modest exhibition of zines and artists’ books, the manner of installation complements the temperament of the work on view. Everything is straightforward and accessible. Ooga Booga, an alternative space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown District, presents for the first time in the United States the complete range of publications issued by the Zurich-based publisher Nieves. Nestled within… Full Review

Curated by Silvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Sciré, the exhibition of late paintings by Titian initiated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and continued with variations at the Accademia was rich in materials from which to learn more about the great Venetian artist. While the Venetian venue showed only twenty-eight paintings, these offered much upon which to meditate. Occupying a space that was once the church of the Carità, and typically used at the Accademia for temporary shows, the paintings were displayed with artificial lighting. At first one wished for daylight, but with time one found that this arrangement worked. The… Full Review

Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans… Full Review

This lucidly written and well-illustrated book examines how the effort to create the appearance of spaciousness in individual dwellings has shaped middle- and upper-class housing in the United States. While recent real estate trends mean that fewer and fewer “middle-class” buyers can afford much spaciousness of any kind, in this book Isenstadt engagingly traces the role and desirability of spaciousness in American housing design. It joins earlier books whose authors have also tried to find larger patterns in the North American residential environment, notably those of Sam Bass Warner, Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Margaret Garb, along with many… Full Review

Is Art History Global? should be read by anyone interested in the history of art as a discipline, and especially anyone interested in its future. The question it asks is of fundamental importance. The problems are clearly outlined and much useful data is presented already in the first part, which includes, besides James Elkins’s introductory materials, three other “starting points” offered by Andrea Giunta (Argentina), Friedrich Teja Bach (Austria), and Ladislav Kesner (Czech Republic). There follows the core of the book: the transcript of a lively seminar that took place in Cork in 2005, involving besides these four figures, Sandra… Full Review

A number of essays and articles published in the last decade have examined the relationship between paintings produced in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (also called “colonial Mexico”) and their counterparts in peninsular Spain in early modernity. Reacting against earlier characterizations of viceregal works as uninteresting or amateurish copies of contemporaneous European prints and canvases, the more recent literature makes a claim that is by now very familiar to historians of colonial art: New Spanish painting partakes of an “Old World” tradition, but ultimately it is an autonomous phenomenon with its own history. Creating the Cult of Saint… Full Review

Astonishingly, The Unknown Monet delivers just what the title promises. Drawing upon a previously unavailable account of Monet’s life, the authors have been able to fill in many of the blanks so frustrating to modern biographers. This material not only provides a very new image of Monet, especially during the 1850s and 1860s, but it offers a new context for his drawings and pastels. The works on paper were included in the final volume of Daniel Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné (Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 5, Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1991)—although not in the more accessible… Full Review

The fall 2007 issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly (vol. 18, no. 4) is devoted entirely to Taliesin, the famous architect’s retreat upon which he had begun construction in 1911 and to which he would invite apprentices to work and live in fellowship with him starting in 1932. (Perched just beneath the crest of a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin, Taliesin derives its name from the Welsh word meaning “shining brow.”) To the delight of Wright aficionados, The Quarterly overflows with dozens of new photographs of this recently refurbished “national treasure” rendered in bright, luminescent color. One older photograph captures… Full Review