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

Allan Antliff
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 292 pp.; 4 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9780226021041)
Allan Antliff’s study of the relations between American art and what he identifies as anarchist beliefs and political activity between 1908 and the end of World War I is a fascinating and important contribution to a knowledge of the wider circumstances of artistic production in the United States during this period. In a historical narrative connected solidly to thematic analyses, Antliff deals alternatively with organizations of varying kinds as well as with individual artists that, together, constituted a thriving anarchist political “micro-culture” of conjoined artistic production and critical discourse. Despite some of the weaknesses in Antliff’s account (elements of which… Full Review
May 14, 2008
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Deborah Rothschild, ed.
Exh. cat. Williamstown and Berkeley: Williams College Museum of Art in association with University of California Press, 2007. 244 pp.; 70 color ills.; 145 b/w ills. Paper $34.95 (9780520252400)
Exhibition schedule: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, July 8–November 11, 2007; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, February 26–May 4, 2008; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, June 8–September 15, 2008
Gerald and Sara Murphy were admired—adored—by many of the best-known members of the transatlantic avant-garde in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, their frequent guest both in Paris and on the Riviera, wrote happily of being “entertained . . . with great elegance and a great deal of gin fizz.” For Fernand Léger, Gerald was “the only American painter in Paris.” F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to them; the novel’s protagonists, the Divers, were modeled on the Murphys. Perhaps the best indicator of the breadth of their sparkling circle is a souvenir menu from a party they threw… Full Review
May 14, 2008
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Although not well known to the general public, the eighteenth-century French painter and draughtsman Gabriel de Saint-Aubin has long compelled specialists working on virtually every aspect of Parisian social and cultural life. His exuberant depictions took the form of drawings in chalk, ink, and watercolor, as well as etchings and a few oil paintings, while his subjects ranged over most aspects of the cultured world around him: social interaction both high and low; theater; royal ceremony; legal proceedings; portraiture; history; architecture and ornamental design; and the unique product for which he is best known, miniature depictions of other artists’ works… Full Review
May 6, 2008
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Tomaso Montanari
Exh. cat. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007. 239 pp.; 51 color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper Euros35.00 (9788836609604)
Exhibition schedule: Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini, Rome, October 19, 2007–January 20, 2008
Bernini pittore, the title of the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s painterly practice as well as of the accompanying catalogue, is a provocative reconstruction of this lesser-known aspect of the Baroque artist’s multidisciplinary career. Conceived and curated by Tomaso Montanari for the recently restored Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the comprehensive exhibit and catalogue offer a new monograph on Bernini’s painting under a purposely familiar title. Montanari’s version of “Bernini pittore” is preceded by two catalogue raissonnée of the same name: Luigi Grassi’s pioneering monograph, Bernini pittore (Rome: Danesi, 1945), and the recent book by Francesco Petrucci, Bernini… Full Review
April 30, 2008
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Margaret Dikovitskaya
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 344 pp.; 57 b/w ills. Paper $19.95 (9780262541886)
In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 (1996): 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment… Full Review
April 29, 2008
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Okwui Enwezor
Exh. cat. New York and Göttingen: International Center of Photography and Steidl, 2008. 224 pp.; 185 ills. Paper $45.00 (978385216229)
Exhibition schedule: International Center of Photography, New York, January 18–May 4, 2008
Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, explores a variety of ways in which contemporary artists appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure archival materials and structures. It focuses on photography and film while at the same time conducting, as Enwezor argues in his catalogue essay, “critical transactions” against “the exactitude of the photographic trace” (11). The term “archive” is thus meant to suggest not the literal image of a dusty file cabinet full of old documents but, following Michel Foucault’s influential The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan… Full Review
April 23, 2008
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Andrew Carrington Shelton
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 334 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $101.00 (9780521842433)
The past decade or so has seen the emergence of a great deal of stimulating writing on Ingres, including important work by Carol Ockman, Adrian Rifkin, Susan Siegfried, and others.[1] One defining characteristic of this new writing is its interest in and acceptance of tensions and paradoxes in Ingres’s work and reception. As Siegfried writes in the introduction to a special issue of Art History devoted to the artist, the “new way of thinking about Ingres . . . illuminates the artist as a subject of contradictions, which are . . . constitutive of his practice and deeply embedded as… Full Review
April 23, 2008
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Adam Hardy
Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 256 pp.; 320 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780470028278)
Amazon.com has one customer review of Adam Hardy’s earlier study, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation, the Karṇāṭa Drāviḍa Tradition, 7th to 13th Centuries (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1995), from a reader “fascinated by ancient Indian temples,” looking for “beautiful pictures with some descriptive text spattered about here and there,” who concluded from its over-many “hand-drawings of details after details” and black-and-white plates that the book “was not for me (a reader with a casual interest in temple architecture), but probably is an excellent source for the academic architect.” Hardy’s new study addresses this audience, condensing his architectural analysis, examining many… Full Review
April 23, 2008
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Gail Levin
New York: Harmony Books, 2006. 496 pp.; 27 color ills.; 26 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9781400054121 )
This past summer I went to see, for the first time, Judy Chicago’s notorious The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, its first permanent home since its creation in 1979. The work—which spurred heated controversy and a plethora of both hostile and heartfelt responses—represents a dinner party of thirty-nine accomplished but largely forgotten women from history; each attendee is symbolized by her own place setting, including a plate illustrating her genitals. Having studied feminist art for nearly a decade, I was looking forward to this moment—mainly for the chance to see the thing of myth, to put a face to… Full Review
April 22, 2008
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Lynda Roscoe Hartigan
Exh. cat. Salem, Washington, DC, and New Haven: Peabody Essex Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 392 pp.; 183 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300111620)
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, November 17, 2006–February 19, 2007; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, April 28–August 19, 2007; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008
I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a… Full Review
April 22, 2008
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Amy McNair
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 248 pp.; 86 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (9780824829940)
In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images… Full Review
April 16, 2008
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Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber
Exh. cat. New Haven and Houston: Yale University Press in association with Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2008. 240 pp.; 152 color ills. Paper $35.00 (9780890901588)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 21, 2007–January 27, 2008; National Gallery, London, February 20–May 18, 2008
Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public… Full Review
April 15, 2008
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Thomas P. Campbell
London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 440 pp.; 206 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300122343)
Thomas Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is a must read for anyone interested in tapestry, patronage studies, and cultural history. It is the latest addition to an important group of books mapping the tapestry patronage and collections of early modern royalty and nobility: Clifford Brown and Guy Delmarcel examined the Gonzaga collection (Tapestries for the Courts of Federico Ii, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–1563, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); Lucia Meoni has already published two out of four volumes that focus on the Medici tapestries (Gli arazzi nei… Full Review
April 9, 2008
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Two weeks after opening its Gates of Paradise exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a symposium to explore various issues surrounding the creation, reception, and conservation of Ghiberti’s masterpiece. An international panel of art historians, curators, and conservators offered a range of general and specialist talks to accompany the remarkable loan of three narrative reliefs and four framing elements from the final set of bronze doors created for the Florentine Baptistery. Ian Wardropper, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Metropolitan’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (ESDA), welcomed conference attendees. Cristina Acidini, Superintendent of the… Full Review
April 8, 2008
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Gary M. Radke, ed.
Exh. cat. Atlanta and New Haven: High Museum of Art Atlanta in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 184 pp.; 269 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300126150)
Exhibition schedule: High Museum of Art, Atlanta, April 28–July 15, 2007; Art Institute of Chicago, July 28–October 13, 2007; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 30, 2007–January 13, 2008; Seattle Art Museum, January 26–April 6, 2008
bq. “. . . this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” (Petrarch, Africa, IX, 453–7, quoted by Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Westview Press, 1960, 10) Petrarch’s concluding words to his epic poem Africa are equally applicable to Ghiberti studies. Long under the dark shadows of Richard Krautheimer and John Pope-Hennessy, Lorenzo Ghiberti and his magnificent Gates of Paradise from the Florentine Baptistery are finally being seen in a… Full Review
April 8, 2008
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