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

Exhibition schedule: Getty Research Institute Gallery, The Getty Center, Los Angeles, July 10–October 7, 2007
For over fifteen years Peggy Phelan’s astute characterization of performance art has remained persuasive. This is due in equal parts to the elegance of her formulation and to the radical social possibilities her understanding of the medium implies and permits. “Performance’s only life,” Phelan contends, “is in the present. Performance cannot,” she continues, “be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s… Full Review
October 4, 2007
Exhibition schedule: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, June 7–September 16, 2007
The Smart Museum bears a long tradition of exhibiting the art of early twentieth-century Germany, a period of remarkable cultural, political, and social transformation. Exhibitions such as The German Print Portfolio, 1890–1930: Serials from a Private Sphere (1993) and Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections (2003) have explored different manifestations of this change across several themes, from the portfolio as a medium for visualizing personal experience to collective and individual notions of national identity from the nineteenth century through National Socialism. Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890–1933, curated by Richard A. Born, senior curator… Full Review
September 25, 2007
Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with MIT Press, 2006. 512 pp.; 475 color ills. Cloth $59.95 (9780914357995)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, March 4–July 16, 2007; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, September 21–December 16, 2007; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, February–June 2008; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, October 4, 2008–January 18, 2009
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is an international survey of artworks featuring radical subject matter, experimental processes, and aesthetic activism from the women’s movement. This exhibition is one of the first major retrospectives of women’s artwork from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It also includes performance documents, interdisciplinary projects, and journals that reflect the many different political responses that gender discrimination provoked in the seventies. Since that decade, we have come to call this social revolution “feminism.” And like the social movement itself, this extensive collection of “early feminist art” reflects the complex set of issues and… Full Review
September 25, 2007
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Jean-Luc Nancy
Trans Jeff Fort New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. 168 pp.; 5 b/w ills. Paper $23.00 (0823225410)
Something we call “the image” flickers oddly in and out of art history. Sometimes it appears at what we often take to be the margins of the discipline—it can, for example, seem definitive of visual culture after “the end of art” or prior to “the era of art.” When it appears in these places, it can suggest the need to redefine art history in ways that not only remove explicit art—aesthetic art, art from the Renaissance through some moment of the recent past—from the center of the field but that tend also to transform what we’ve taken as importantly historical… Full Review
September 25, 2007
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Edward Booth-Clibborn
London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2006. 240 pp.; 350 color ills. Paper £28.00 (1861542925)
The cover of Phoenix: 21st Century City invites the viewer to fly into the Valley of the Sun: PHX is printed in large letters against a blue sky and a plane is visible at a distance. One’s introduction to Phoenix continues inside the cover with a series of boldly cropped photographs of upscale shopping centers, car dealerships, desert cacti, hipster skateboarders in front of the futuristic Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse, and classic 1960s neon signs advertising laundromats, car dealerships, and florists. The photographs are linked together by swooping, aerodynamic white lines. The bold layout continues inside. The… Full Review
September 20, 2007
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Gavin Butt
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 232 pp.; 4 color ills.; 44 b/w ills. Paper $22.95 (0822334984)
The initial premise of Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me is that new ways of looking at the New York art world of the 1950s and ’60s can be found by examining the gossip of queer men within that circle. To many the idea that queer men run the art world, while insatiably gossiping with one another, seems to support homophobic constructions of queer identity. I am relieved to say that Butt presents his material in such a way that the artificiality of such stereotypes is fully acknowledged, occasionally celebrated, but mostly subverted. None of the themes of this book… Full Review
September 19, 2007
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Daniele Benati and Eugenio Riccòmini
Exh. cat. Mondadori Electa, 2006. 500 pp.; 148 color ills.; 122 b/w ills. Paper Euros40.00 (883704349X)
Exhibition schedule: Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, September 21, 2006–January 7, 2007; Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, January 26–June 5, 2007
Annibale Carracci spent most of the twentieth century in relative obscurity, his reputation overshadowed by that of other artists from his era. Though he was acknowledged by Caravaggio as a fellow “true painter” (Bellori) and served as inspiration to an awestruck adolescent Bernini (Baldinucci), Annibale’s fame has steadily dwindled since the nineteenth century, when illustrious visitors on the Grand Tour waxed rhapsodic over his work and made pilgrimages to Bologna and Parma to admire his altarpieces. Despite Dennis Mahon’s Herculean efforts to bring Annibale and his academy back into the spotlight and Charles Dempsey’s explorations of the technical and… Full Review
September 19, 2007
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Olga Palagia, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 342 pp.; 8 color ills.; 94 b/w ills. Cloth $112.00 (0521772672)
Since classical antiquity, Greek sculpture has occupied a premier position in the history of art. Pliny the Elder relied on earlier writers such as Xenokrates, Antigonos, and Pasiteles for his accounts of ancient Greek statues in marble and bronze, which appear in chapters of his Natural History devoted to stone and metals. Materials and techniques were of primary interest to Pliny, but his treatment—and those of many modern art historians until quite recently—nonetheless focused largely on stylistic development and the seemingly inevitable “progress” toward more naturalistic rendering of the human form, which is Greek sculpture’s principal subject. The past… Full Review
September 18, 2007
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Gregory P. A. Levine
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 444 pp.; 80 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth (0295985402)
Besides dealing with objects and images, the art historian inevitably works also with stories. Some are “the facts” that place a piece of art within a context; some are the myths and legends that surround the art: stories about creation and origin or artistic intention and imagination, as well as stories about the history of a work, its influence and importance (or lack of such) over time. Clearly the stories about a work can be important; yet the dangers in selecting and interpreting these are numerous. Moreover, in a field like art history, in which coffee-table volumes and “general interest”… Full Review
September 13, 2007
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Rebecca Zurier
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 418 pp.; 12 color ills.; 149 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780520220188)
From its first words, “Picture this,” Rebecca Zurier’s important new book offers readers vivid visual and intellectual insights into both Ashcan School images and the modern culture of urban New York in which they developed. Beginning with a lively evocation of the details in John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window (1907), Zurier analyzes the rapidly developing processes of representation, display, and active looking that shaped the city’s changing cultural milieu from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. What did it mean, she asks, to live in a culture of newly exciting visual spectacle provided by street advertising… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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John Varriano
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 288 pp.; 104 color ills. Paper $40.95 (0271027185)
The sight of John Varriano’s Caravaggio: Art of Realism on the list of new literary offerings inevitably raises the question whether the art world really needs another treatise on Caravaggio. The provocative image of Victorious Love (1601–2) chosen for the book jacket, moreover, awakens the fear that Varriano’s contribution may be yet another wearisome exploration of the sexuality of the seventeenth-century artist. The recent literature on Caravaggio can be overwhelming. In the realm of biographies, readers can select anything from Helen Langdon’s brilliant Caravaggio: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) to Peter Robb’s lamentable flight of… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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On April 22, 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored a symposium to discuss issues surrounding the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797. The symposium brought together a group of experts on the interactions between Venice and Islam. In his introduction to the symposium, Stefano Carboni, curator of the exhibition and administrator of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum, emphasized the three concepts governing the exhibition: to show the reasons why Venice had so many trade relationships with the Islamic world, to examine the relationship between trade and diplomacy, and to discuss Venice’s… Full Review
September 12, 2007
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Miguel Falomir, ed.
Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007. 465 pp.; 206 color ills. Paper $90.00 (1903470463)
Exhibition schedule: January 30–May 27, 2007
The Prado’s exhibition on Tintoretto, mounted by curator Miguel Falomir, meets the standard that a show is justified by its educational value to both the specialist and the public. Occupying the central wing of the primo piano of the Prado, the exhibit is mounted spaciously and offers judicious juxtapositions of paintings, drawings, and technical data. While presenting itself as the first monographic exhibition for the artist since 1937, the show also disclaims any pretension to be complete. (During the Tintoretto anniversary year of 1994, the Accademia in Venice provided an exhibition of Tintoretto’s portraiture, at which time an itinerary of… Full Review
September 6, 2007
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Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Exh. cat. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2006. 184 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper (0295985712)
Exhibition schedule: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, January 14–March 26, 2006; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, April 21–July 17, 2006; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA, August 25–November 26, 2006
Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century is an important contribution to the growing literature on race and visual representation in American culture. The beautifully illustrated catalogue includes three essays by guest curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania), two of which expand upon the ideas in her first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). It also contains an introduction by Karen C. C. Dalton… Full Review
September 6, 2007
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Christy Anderson
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 292 pp.; many b/w ills. Cloth $106.00 (0521820278)
“If we try to enclose him in his own time and look into his works instead of outward from them,” John Summerson lamented with a distinct echo of William Kent more than 200 years before him, “we find ourselves gazing at something extremely hard to bring to focus” (Inigo Jones, London: Penguin, 1966, 13). They were both speaking about Inigo Jones, the first intellectually complex architect England has produced in its history of the built environment. John Webb, Jones’s son-in-law, actively promoted Jones as a heroic figure for English architecture; in his book on Stonehenge, Webb carefully edited… Full Review
September 3, 2007
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