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

Robin Kelsey
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 286 pp.; 89 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (9780520249356)
Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review
November 20, 2007
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Eleanor P. DeLorme, ed.
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. 208 pp.; 125 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (0892368012)
The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review
November 15, 2007
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Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and Christina Buley-Uribe
London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007. 440 pp.; 373 ills. Cloth $34.95 (0500238359)
Catherine Lampert and Antoinette Le Normand-Romain
Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006. 320 pp.; 370 color ills. Cloth $85.00 (9781903973660)
Exhibition schedule: Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 23, 2006–January 1, 2007; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, February 9–May 13, 2007
Auguste Rodin enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Great Britain, relishing the company of admiring patrons and fellow artists and exhibiting his work to laudatory reviews. Shortly before his death, he donated eighteen sculptures to the state—the only such donation he made during his lifetime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the British have honored his work in grand retrospectives, including two organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1970 and 1986. In the fall of 2006, the Royal Academy of Arts continued the British romance with Rodin, mounting a new comprehensive… Full Review
November 15, 2007
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Joseph J. Rishel
Exh. cat. Philadelphia and New Haven: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 592 pp.; 431 color ills.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300120036)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, banner-titled “Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros,” September 20–December 31, 2006; Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, Revelaciones, subtitled Las Artes in América Latina, 1492–1820, February 6–June 30, 2007; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, August 1–October 28, 2007
In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review
October 31, 2007
Victoria C. Gardener Coates and Jon L. Seydl
Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2007. 304 pp.; 50 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780892368723)
Susan Weber Soros, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 688 pp.; 500 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (9780300117134)
Exhibition schedule: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York, November 16, 2006–February 18, 2007; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 15–June 24, 2007
Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of… Full Review
October 30, 2007
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Alexander Nehamas
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp.; 8 color ills.; 79 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (0691095213)
This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings. Historical highlights are amply celebrated as Nehamas explores the place of beauty in… Full Review
October 30, 2007
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Madeleine Grynsztejn, ed.
Exh. cat. San Francisco and London: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Thames and Hudson, 2007. 276 pp.; 200 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (0500093407)
Exhibition schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 8, 2007–February 24, 2008; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, April 20–June 30, 2008; Dallas Museum of Art, November 9, 2008–March 15, 2009; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, summer, 2009
The first work of Olafur Eliasson’s that one encounters upon entering the atrium lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is an ordinary fan swinging wildly just overhead. Mesmerizing and a bit menacing at the same time, the work, titled Ventilator (1997), serves as an introduction to a series of meticulously choreographed interactive installations that comprise the artist’s first major U.S. survey exhibition. I experienced a similar sense of heightened awareness when I visited Eliasson’s exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris five years ago. There, I had to cross a carpet of lava… Full Review
October 29, 2007
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Manfredo Tafuri
Trans Daniel Sherer New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Harvard Design School, 2006. 568 pp.; 166 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300111584)
Andrew Leach
Ghent, Belgium: A&S Books, 2007. 250 pp. Paper €22.00 (9789076714301)
In 2006 Yale University Press published an English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s last book—fourteen years after the Italian original and twelve years after the death of its author. Why? Admittedly Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was both famous and controversial in the Anglo-Saxon world. Famous because of the incredibly wide range of his knowledge and his refined scholarship, controversial because of his Marxist views and his preference for urban development over individual works of architecture. In Europe Tafuri was mainly known as a notoriously “difficult” author whose theoretical and historical essays were equally dark and impenetrable. Said an Italian architect: “Tafuri… Full Review
October 29, 2007
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John Pedley
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 290 pp.; 126 b/w ills. Paper $31.99 (9780521006354)
John Pedley has conceived Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World as a college-level introduction to Greek sanctuaries and their place in ancient Greek society. Particular emphasis is given to the natural and built appearance of sanctuaries, to the works of visual arts populating those spaces, to the visual experiences of visitors, to the ritual activities, and to the transformations of sanctuaries over time, from their origins up to the present. After outlining the main themes of the book, Pedley sketches a general introduction to the nature and development of sanctuaries from the Geometric period to the… Full Review
October 29, 2007
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Hoi-chiu Tang
Exh. cat. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 2007. 204 pp.; 115 ills. HKD168.00 (96221520410)
Exhibition schedule: Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, April 4–June 3, 2007
A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: The Art of Lin Fengmian was jointly organized by the Shanghai Art Museum and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The long-awaited exhibition consisted of paintings from the two museums as well as private collections. On display were the artist’s paintings from the 1930s to the 1980s. This retrospective presented Lin’s technical virtuosity and innovative spirit and reaffirmed his artistic authority in twentieth-century Chinese art. Lin Fengmian was born in 1900 in Guangdong province in China. He started his formal education locally and later went to Shanghai and joined a study program that… Full Review
October 18, 2007
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Melissa Hyde
Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006. 272 pp.; 18 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Paper $50.00 (0892367431)
Le rocaille, le goût pittoresque, le petit goût, le goût moderne. During the eighteenth century these terms were used in equal measure to describe artistic production now categorized as rococo, a locution perhaps most famously coined in the “Van Loo, Pompadour, rococo” rallying cry of the students of Jacques-Louis David. Indeed just as the designation rococo was imposed upon the visual culture of an earlier era by those who later rejected its charms, so too was its theorization completed by its detractors, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike. In titling her book Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher… Full Review
October 17, 2007
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Alain Tapié and Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot
Exh. cat. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2007. 328 pp.; 179 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Paper Euros45.00 (9782711852420)
Exhibition schedule: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France, April 27, 2007–August 15, 2007; Musée Rath, Geneva, Switzerland, September 20, 2007–January 13, 2008
Compared to his contemporaries such as Nicolas Poussin and Georges de la Tour, Philippe de Champaigne remains the one great painter of seventeenth-century France who has attracted little scholarly attention. Most scholarship reduces Champaigne’s artistic production to his portraits of Cardinal Richelieu and to his involvement with the Benedictine Convent of Port-Royal, seen as the stronghold of Jansenism in France and to which he gave his famous Ex-Voto (1662, cat. 57). Champaigne dominated both religious painting and portraiture in Paris from his arrival in the capital from his native Brussels in 1621 until his death in 1674. The… Full Review
October 16, 2007
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SITE Santa Fe
Exh. cat. Santa Fe, NM: SITE Santa Fe, 2007. 96 pp.; 42 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Cloth $20.00 (9780976449256)
Exhibition schedule: SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM, February 10–May 13, 2007
Gelderland, Australian artist Stephen Bush's recent exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, revealed him to be someone who both embraces and perverts the academic training he received at the Royal Melbourne Institute in the 1970s. Simply put, Bush’s work examines the absurdity of rehearsing those academic conventions in the early twenty-first century on a continent straddling the Indian and Pacific oceans. Bush's postcolonial self-awareness is itself simultaneously romanticized and pathologized in the ongoing project in which he has been engaged since the early 1990s, specifically, his serial painting of an image titled The Lure of Paris. Inspired… Full Review
October 16, 2007
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Richard Rand
Exh. cat. Williamstown, MA and New Haven, CT: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 228 pp.; 137 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. $55.00 (0300104804)
Exhibition schedule: Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, October 14, 2006–January 14, 2007; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, February 4–April 29, 2007; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 27–August 12, 2007
The superb exhibition Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum could hardly have been more timely. There has not been an exhibition devoted to Claude in the United States since the landmark 1982 retrospective at the National Gallery (H. Diane Russell, Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery, 1982). To formulate the current exhibition, Clark senior curator Richard Rand relied principally on the British Museum, which holds an unparalleled and uniquely comprehensive collection of Claude drawings. Encompassing the Richard Payne Knight collection of some three hundred nature and compositional drawings and Claude's own Liber Veritatis (the… Full Review
October 11, 2007
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Diane J. Reilly
Boston: Brill, 2006. 422 pp.; 10 color ills.; 46 b/w ills. Cloth $147.00 (9789004150973)
The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vaast at Arras was founded in the mid-seventh century and dedicated to the first bishop of the combined dioceses of Arras and Cambrai, Vedastus (d. 540). Its early years are obscure, but it enjoyed a certain flowering in the Carolingian period, illustrated by the abbacy of Rado (808–815), whose name has been tentatively associated with the production of a modestly illuminated pandect Bible, now preserved in Vienna (ÖNB lat. 1190). In late Carolingian times, the Franco-Saxon style of book illumination seems to have held sway at Saint-Vaast, though it was perhaps not the principal center from… Full Review
October 11, 2007
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