Recently Published Reviews

In the introduction to this beautifully designed and highly readable book, Alice Friedman asks: “Why were independent women clients such powerful catalysts for innovation in domestic projects?” (15). The most compelling answer she provides is that these clients’ goals were a close fit with the designers’ desire to completely rethink the home, “a redefinition of domesticity that was fundamentally spatial and physical” (16). Friedman outlines a variety of housing that women clients sought when turning to modern architects: some as showplaces for artistic, political, or social activism; others as experiments in non-traditional living, such as single women, lesbian couples, and… Full Review

The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 was a splendid exhibition covering the period from the time Columbus arrived until the moment when emerging nations from Chile to Mexico moved toward independence. Showing it in three dramatically different venues—Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—resulted in three profoundly different statements. In Philadelphia one simply gasped to see such luxury from so many fabulously wealthy colonies (mostly Spanish and Portuguese). When visitors walked through the Mexican show, however, they noticed something different: a preponderance of Mexican works, with the less numerous objects from the Andes, Brazil, and other nations positioned as if to… Full Review

Michael Meister’s review of my book The Temple Architecture of India brings to the fore two basic and interrelated questions about medieval Indian temples. How should one name and classify their various forms? And how were these forms conceived and designed? The review focuses largely on typology and terminology. Meister implies one general criticism: that I do not adequately follow the names suggested for shrine forms by inscriptions and texts. Here the distinction needs to be made between deciphering the intended meaning of architectural categories used in texts with no illustrations, and categorizing, through illustrations as well as words,… Full Review

Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830 is the companion publication to the best and most comprehensive exhibition of portraits, and indeed of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art, not to have come to the United States in a long time. The show, conceived by the late Robert Rosenblum and MaryAnne Stevens, was originally intended to travel to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in addition to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. But construction issues at the Guggenheim prompted the cancellation of the U.S. venue, and the exhibition stayed in… Full Review

Some of the most recognizable regional art forms in the United States today are New Mexican santos. These religious devotional objects include retablos (painted wood panels) and bultos (polychromed three-dimensional sculpture), and they originated in the Hispanic colonial period of New Mexico (late sixteenth–early nineteenth century). Their fabrication has continued into the twenty-first century, coinciding with a renewed interest in these objects. Numerous publications and exhibitions appearing since the early twentieth century attest to the popularity of santos, yet an understanding of them has plateaued in recent decades. Scholars have primarily focused on the santeros, or creators… Full Review

Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs… Full Review

Charmaine Nelson has produced an important book framing American Neoclassical sculpture within nineteenth-century discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. She explores the ways in which the intersecting categories of “blackness” and “femininity” are socially, politically, culturally, and psychically constructed in and through the representational practices of ideal statuary. As a black feminist scholar, Nelson wants to “render [her] methodological apparatus” transparent and is committed to pursuing a methodology that explores “race and racial signification as inextricable from sex and gender signification” (xvi, xxi). It is only recently that British, Canadian, and U.S. art historians have looked afresh at… Full Review

Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects). The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s… Full Review

The Kimbell Museum’s Masterpiece Series introduces select works from the museum’s permanent collection to an audience both lay and specialist. As part of this series, Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop perfectly blends the often neglected art of careful connoisseurship with a wealth of visual and historical context. There is far more than one would suspect in the brief eighty-six-page text as Smith examines the silver-gilt Kimbell Virgin in exacting detail. He produces a rich visual analysis that explains technical production and describes the training and working methods… Full Review

This past February, French President Nicolas Sarkozy aroused international controversy by revising the national school curriculum, requiring every fifth-grade student to “adopt” one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust by learning their story. The plan drew wide-ranging criticism for its pedagogical insensitivity and political opportunism. The terms in which Sarkozy framed his proposal––expressly affirming Judeo-Christian values––were especially inflammatory, given the traditional secularism of French governance and the intensity of ongoing debate around the politics of Islam. Less attention was devoted to a new German program in which middle-school classes will study the Holocaust using The Search… Full Review

An 1870 satirical cartoon from the journal Paris-Caprice depicts an artist, palette in hand, painting directly onto his female subject’s skin. Conflating the two meanings of “painting a face,” the artist eliminates the need for a canvas. Tamar Garb finds this spoof central to understanding the complex intersection of social, psychological, and symbolic factors involved in painted portraits. In The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914, she suggests that the metaphorical relationship between applying makeup to a face and paint to canvas provides a useful key to analyzing the superficiality and artifice found in oil paintings of… Full Review

As everyone who studies and loves the art of Rubens knows, the essential challenge posed by his work is a tension between the colorful, dynamic sensuality of his figures and the abstract concepts they often represent. Lisa Rosenthal’s ambitious, beautifully wrought study reveals that this tension is not only Rubens’s deliberate project but an especially fruitful one. In a felicitously tight structure, Rosenthal concentrates on just five paintings: four political and mythological works and a family self-portrait. She offers bold yet extraordinarily subtle and sympathetic readings of the pictures and other related images, marshaling semiotics, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches in… Full Review

“Is it real?” asks a French journalist as reported by contributing author, Howard Morphy, in the third section of the Museum Frictions anthology. She is watching a ceremonial performance by Yolngu people at the opening of the new National Museum of Australia in 2001 (489). Such a question, or the more pointed variation “What is real in a museum?” underlies the whole of this extensive (almost daunting) volume. It is a question that has already been addressed in the two books that precede it in the same series, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Durham: Duke University… Full Review

In the spring of 1944 the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters; it was the first time that modern Cuban art was presented in the international arena. Organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., with assistance from the Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre, the exhibition was a success with the public as well as the critics. Although limited to the work of only thirteen painters, Modern Cuban Painters remains a seminal moment in the history of Cuban art. Since then there have been over twenty exhibitions focused on Cuban art that have… Full Review

The story behind this unusual, revealing, and enjoyable exhibition and accompanying catalogue begins with the voyage, in May 2003, of a life-size painting, fifteen-feet across, of an exotic, two-ton beast. Rolled up in storage for a century and a half, this all-but-forgotten portrait of a celebrity rhinoceros arrived in Los Angeles that month from the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, in the former German Democratic Republic, to be conserved at the Getty Museum and readied for permanent exhibition back home in Schwerin. The voyage of the painting mirrors another, earlier voyage—that of the animal herself. Born in India and brought to… Full Review