Recently Published Reviews

As interventions within contemporary art’s ongoing male and Western hegemonies, two recent, groundbreaking shows of global women artists, Global Feminisms and Tiger by the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture, were timely. After seeing Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum last spring, I was equally thrilled to see it remixed at the Davis Museum in the fall—thrilled because the show is needed, because it is exciting to discover new artistic responses to age-old problems, and because it is still regrettably rare to see feminist concerns addressed overtly in art. The Davis version of the show was truncated, which… Full Review

As “the first anthology to deal with the painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography of the 1930s in a hemispheric context” (xiii), this ambitious collection of fourteen essays makes a significant contribution to the vigorous literature of this seminal decade. While more than half of the volume is focused on the United States, articles take a Pan-American approach in considering work from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada. The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean with North America reveals remarkable cross-cultural commonalities that remind the reader that the borders demarcating the countries where these artists worked were more political than… Full Review

Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych is the scholarly catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by its authors for the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, in association with the Harvard University Art Museums. Complementing the volume is a second book, Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), which collects writings by thirteen specialists from the field of Netherlandish art history. The catalogue focuses primarily on material, technical, and qualitative issues contextualized by format and use, while its… Full Review

A certain swath of the collective museum-going, architecture-loving audience must be endlessly fascinated by the success of David Adjaye. Just forty-one years old, his rise to the top echelon of his profession has happened quickly, and has just as suddenly put his name into the minds of a larger group interested in celebrity homes, industrial design, and the perversely compelling cult of genius prodigies. That Adjaye is arguably the most prominent contemporary (if not twentieth-century) architect of African descent might also be deserving of some scrutiny, and yet Adjaye takes pains to suppress that aspect of his work, perhaps as… Full Review

In judging a photograph, one distinguishes between the quality of the image and that of the object shown, and so it is with a literary anthology. American Architectural History, edited by Keith Eggener, is a compilation of essays published between 1981 and 2002 that presents a vivid and faithful image of the discipline today. What it reveals about that discipline is, of course, a different question altogether. American Architectural History was designed to free the instructor from the burdensome task of making a reading packet to supplement a survey text. One can do this with a set of… Full Review

Near the end of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he describes the effect of seeing a scene from Fellini’s film Casanova, in which the protagonist dances with an automaton. Barthes is overwhelmed by the beautiful simulacrum of a young woman, discussing how the combination of “desperate” inertness and apparent affection touched him in the same way as the “punctum” in photography. Mulvey recalls this scene in her book Death 24x a Second, as she engages in a dialogue with Barthes, for whom cinema was normally free from the elegiac effects that he described in photography. The project of… Full Review

While many scholars celebrate Aaron Douglas as the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, there remains a widespread unfamiliarity with the diversity of his artistic production and his manifold contributions to the New Negro Movement. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, the first nationally touring retrospective of his work, attends to this disparity. Organized by Susan Earle and coordinated by Stephanie Fox Nappe for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the exhibition showcases Douglas’s output in a variety of media, displaying oil paintings, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, book and record jackets, magazine covers, illustrations, and murals… Full Review

At the outset of Reinventing the Wheel, Stephen Teiser recounts an episode from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that sets into motion the primary theme of his study. In this episode, the British curator of the Lahore Museum and a Tibetan lama exchange views in which the former presents Buddhism as a sweeping phenomenon framed by the panorama of book knowledge, while the latter intimates that the true fruits of the religion are found more locally in one’s own awareness and experience. Likewise, the modern scholar must negotiate similar tensions in the study of Buddhist art. While the undeniable similarities of… Full Review

Georgia Inside and Out: Architecture, Landscape, and Decorative Arts follows the publication in 2003 of the First Henry D. Green Symposium—The Savannah River Valley to 1865: Fine Arts, Architecture, and Decorative Arts, also edited by Ashley Callahan. The symposium series is named in honor of Henry D. Green (1909–2003), who beginning in the 1930s established himself as a pioneer in the appreciation and study of Southern heritage, particularly Southern decorative arts. Under Callahan’s direction, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens brings a welcome focus on its home state. For decades the study… Full Review

Ella Shohat’s Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is a collection of essays written largely over a two-decade period spanning the 1980s and 1990s. Shohat contributed prolifically to discussions in the emerging knowledge domains of multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, and transnational feminisms; moreover, she did so in a rigorous and self-conscious manner, always probing the new paradigms in a critical way. The essays here record this engagement with transformations in the North American academy over the past couple of decades, and they demonstrate the work of an author who has vigilantly critiqued the post-Enlightenment legacies of an enduring Eurocentricism. Indeed, the collection functions… Full Review

Was the Bauhaus a great equalizer? Perhaps that idea was beside the point for its visionary founders, but they did have to confront modernity’s democratically inclusive trajectory, which has consistently pitted mass production and its resultant “low” culture against a reductive aesthetic resistant to populist incursions into the “high” art realm. It fell to the Bauhaus, that iconic institutionalization of avant-garde theory and practice, to attempt a fusion through an educational structure that sought to reconcile art and commerce (with a decided bent for the former). Always a subject for modernist art historians, the Bauhaus is under fresh scrutiny from… Full Review

Originating at the Blanton Museum of Art and organized by its Latin American curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, The Geometry of Hope features over 125 works produced by artists from Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina between 1930 and 1970. A respected scholar in the field, specializing in Argentinian Madi art (one of the movements represented in the exhibition), Pérez-Barreiro has assembled the most comprehensive presentation to date of the alternative modernity that due to a wide array of factors—chief among them the influx of avant-garde European ideas, works, and people between and in the wake of the two World Wars—flourished in the… Full Review

Since the 1936 publication of Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the revolutionary impact of the photographic medium has been widely acknowledged, while the extent and nature of this impact has been much debated. Following Benjamin, some scholars have focused on photography’s effect on the nature and status of the art object; others have concentrated on its role in spectacle, on its ability to aestheticize everyday life, including the realm of politics, which is what Benjamin observed, and feared, in 1930s Germany. Part of this aestheticization of politics involved the visualization of… Full Review

It goes without saying that “naturalism” has played an absolutely central role in art-historical discourse. This is true in two broad senses. On one hand, there is artistic practice: artists have, in various ways, relied on the observation of the visible world in the creation of images. On the other, there is the standard art-historical narrative, articulated by scholars from Pliny through Vasari to the present, which posits a diagnostic role to the perception of naturalism, gauging the degree of an image’s naturalism to discern intention and meaning, and assigns particular works to one or another art-historical epoch. Jean Givens’s… Full Review

Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych serves as an excellent companion to the exhibition catalogue for Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, also edited by John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, along with Catherine Metzger (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). The product of two roundtable discussions, its thirteen fine scholarly essays present a rich array of related topics. In the first essay, Victor Schmidt addresses the development of diptychs prior to 1400. He begins by showing that the term “diptychum” or “diptycha” originally referred to a set of… Full Review