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

M. A. Dhaky
New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies and D. K. Printworld (P) Limited, 2005. 490 pp.; 403 b/w ills. Cloth $144.00 (8124602239)
The Indian Temple Traceries by M. A. Dhaky, dean of Indian architectural historians, is a fascinating study of the variety to be found within a single element of the fabric of Indian temples—the jāla or jālaka (Sanskrit), jālī (Hindi), tracery, pierced screen, grill, or lattice. Dhaky’s starting point is the terminology of the Sanskrit architectural treatises, which provide names for the types of jāla but generally do not define them. Providing plausible identifications depends not only on comparing the terms in different texts but on an encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of jāla through the ages. Dhaky’s analysis is accompanied… Full Review
April 2, 2008
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Katherine Ware and Peter Barberie
Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 336 pp.; 284 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300116438)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, June 17–September 17, 2006
In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at… Full Review
April 1, 2008
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Stefano Carboni, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. 375 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300124309)
Exhibition schedule: Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, October 2, 2006–February 18, 2007; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 27–July 8, 2007
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator. Carboni eloquently guides… Full Review
March 26, 2008
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John Peacock
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. 320 pp.; 4 color ills.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (0754607194)
In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van… Full Review
March 26, 2008
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Kathleen Pyne
Exh. cat. Berkeley, Santa Fe, and Atlanta: University of California Press, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and High Museum of Art Atlanta, 2007. 378 pp.; 97 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Paper $34.95 (9780520241893)
Exhibition schedule: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, September 21, 2007–January 13, 2008; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, February 9–May 4, 2008; San Diego Museum of Art, May 24–September 28, 2008
This impressive and dense book examines a subject that on the surface seems to have been fully explored: early American modernism and the Stieglitz circle.[1] Alfred Stieglitz’s renowned wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, remains a central figure among these various publications. It is not surprising, then, that Kathleen Pyne also weaves her text around the importance of this artist who, according to Pyne’s account, fulfilled Stieglitz’s search for a “woman-child,” a sexually active adult who could retain her childhood innocence to capture in her art a pure, essential feminine vision, and who could assist him in creating his own identity as a… Full Review
March 25, 2008
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Kim Sloan
Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press and British Museum Press, 2007. 256 pp.; 250 color ills. Paper $29.95 (9780807858257)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, March 15–June, 17 2007; Yale Center for British Art, March 6–June 1, 2008
A New World is a beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging catalogue of the British Museum’s rarely exhibited collection of John White’s watercolors. White’s pictures record the people and nature he encountered while accompanying a group of English colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to Roanoke Island in 1585. Some of these images, particularly his studies of the native inhabitants of what is now coastal North Carolina, are iconic, while others—fireflies, Puerto Rico, Turks—are considerably less well-known. The catalogue’s six essays, by Kim Sloan, curator of British drawings and watercolors at the British Museum, and Joyce Chaplin, Christian Feest, and Ute Kuhlemann, successfully… Full Review
March 25, 2008
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Edward van Voolen
Munich: Prestel, 2006. 192 pp.; 200 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9783791333625)
Jewish art poses a perennial problem of definition, just like Jewish identity. Inevitably the question arises about whether an artist has to be considered Jewish, and even what that might mean: is it a matter of ethnicity or of religion? Additionally, many early Jewish contributions to visual culture lie entirely outside any identification of an artistic hand; rather, they are defined chiefly through their location and function, usually as decorations within a ritual context of religious practice, be it in a synagogue or home. Yet even in those cases, the makers of the objects need not have been Jewish themselves… Full Review
March 19, 2008
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Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: American University Museum, 2007. 64 pp.; 43 color ills.; 5 b/w ills. Paper $10.00 (1879383659)
Exhibition schedule: American University Museum, Washington, DC, November 6, 2007–January 27, 2008
Claiming Space is a small, carefully curated exhibition with a big heart and ambitious agenda. It makes a compelling argument that feminist artists working in the late sixties into the early eighties had an enormous role in defining and expanding what constitutes feminist culture, and that any history of the period—social, political, cultural, or art historical—is woefully incomplete if these artists are not fully integrated into these stories. The history of this period and the art of the nineties simply does not make sense otherwise. There are nineteen artists represented in the exhibition, including major works by Judith Bernstein, Judy… Full Review
March 19, 2008
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Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 208 pp.; 10 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Paper $21.95 (0822333961)
In Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contextualizes the production and interpretation of Kara Walker’s fantastical depictions of slavery as produced in installation silhouettes, prints, and drawings between the years 1995 and 1998. Through five well-paced chapters, Shaw investigates the personal and art-historical origins of Walker’s art, analyzes three of Walker’s most dense and widely-circulated silhouettes, and addresses the passionate and complex reception to Walker’s challenging images. At the beginning of her text, Shaw reveals her own stunned reaction to seeing Walker’s artwork for the first time in 1997. Following her encounter,… Full Review
March 18, 2008
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Jeffrey Spier
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Kimbell Art Museum, 2007. 328 pp.; 251 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300116830)
Exhibition schedule: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, November 18, 2007–March 30, 2008
Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully… Full Review
March 12, 2008
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Angela Miller, Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. 704 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper $100.00 (9780130300041)
Crafting a useful and compelling textbook from the diverse, contested, and ever-mutating material and methodologies of any scholarly field constitutes no small task. The authors of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity are to be congratulated for the boldness and originality with which they approached such an endeavor, and their survey of the art and visual culture of the geographic region now known as the United States does indeed constitute, as the back-cover copy states, a “tremendous accomplishment.” The text presents a persuasive and rich portrait of the history of the arts in America on two levels.… Full Review
March 11, 2008
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Adam Sharr
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 139 pp.; 53 ills. Cloth $24.95 (9780262195515)
Heidegger’s Hut offers a full architectural analysis of a very simple structure, the philosopher’s retreat in Todtnauberg. As Simon Sadler says in his foreword, “This is the most thorough architectural ‘crit’ of a hut ever set down” (ix). Of course the hut would never have attracted such attention were it not Heidegger’s. The oral tradition that accompanied Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world (and perhaps elsewhere) involved rumors of the philosopher working at a remote mountain hut. Well before the 1980s, when the question of Heidegger’s Nazism became unavoidable for scholars, the legend that accompanied him was that of the… Full Review
March 5, 2008
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Constance Lewallen, ed.
Exh. cat. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and University of California Press, 2007. 256 pp.; 75 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780520250857)
Exhibition schedule: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, January 17–April 15, 2007; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (Torino), Italy, May 23–September 9, 2007; Menil Collection, Houston, October 12, 2007–January 13, 2008
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play… Full Review
March 4, 2008
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Thomas P. Campbell, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 592 pp.; 175 color ills.; 169 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300124071)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 16, 2007–January 6, 2008; Palacio Real, Madrid, March 6–June 1, 2008
Even for the Metropolitan Museum of Art it was impossible to duplicate the revelatory experience and concomitant visitor record of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, the 2002 precursor of the present show and the first major U.S. exhibition on the topic in twenty-five years. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor comes just five years later and simply could not be marketed as the same kind of novelty. Yet the faithful, returning museumgoer is rewarded with experiences of rare beauty, historical insight, and displays of astonishing technical virtuosity that are at least equal to those in the… Full Review
February 27, 2008
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Anne Friedberg
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. 448 pp.; 113 b/w ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780262062527)
This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward, writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania… Full Review
February 27, 2008
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