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

Bruce Coats
Exh. cat. Boston and Claremont, CA: Hotei Publishing and Scripps College, 2006. 208 pp.; 280 color ills. Cloth $123.00 (9074822886)
Exhibition schedule: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, August 26–October 22, 2006; Carleton College Art Gallery, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, January 12–March 4, 2007; Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, March 23–May 13, 2007; Burke Gallery, Denison University, Granville, OH, September 8–October 28, 2007; Boston University Art Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA, November 16, 2007–February 12, 2008; Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, February–May 2008
It is delightful to see the first exhibition in the West devoted to the prolific, yet relatively under-studied Meiji artist Yôshû Chikanobu (1838–1893). To date, Chikanobu has been overshadowed by the popular artists of the time, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915). Although Chikanobu’s works are often discussed in books and journals, there has been no monograph or exhibition devoted to him in Japan or in the West; thus both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are significant contributions to the study of Chikanobu’s work and to Meiji prints in general. The exhibition opened in… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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Jennifer R. Gross, ed.
New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Yale University Art Gallery, 2006. 252 pp.; 302 color ills.; 62 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300109210)
Exhibition schedule: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, April 23–August 20, 2006; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, October 14, 2006–January 21, 2007; Dallas Museum of Art, June 10–September 16, 2007; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, October 26, 2007–February 3, 2008; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 2010
In an interview conducted by curator Jennifer Gross with the contemporary abstract painter Robert Mangold in August of 2004, the artist openly acknowledged his relative unfamiliarity with the Société Anonyme, the progressive, independent art organization that Katherine Dreier (1877–1952) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) founded in 1920. Under the aegis of the Société, Duchamp and Dreier assembled a remarkable collection of modern art, donating the bulk of the holdings to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941 (http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon). As a student at Yale during the mid-fifties and early-sixties, Mangold recalled that he had “seen individual works” at the art gallery… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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Stephanie S. Dickey
College Art Association.
By most accounts, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606, as stated by the Leiden chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641. Recently, a few close reviews of the documentation have suggested that the date should be moved to 1607, but this revelation failed to stop the juggernaut already set in motion by museums eager to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The “Rembrandt Year” of 2006 witnessed the staging of dozens of exhibitions across the world, both major loan shows and focused opportunities for museums to showcase their holdings of works by Rembrandt… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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Mark A. Cheetham
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 192 pp.; 8 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $98.00 (0521842069)
Abstraction is ailing. Ever since Clement Greenberg stopped making the rounds and writing reviews, its health has been on one long, slow decline. Yet as Mark Cheetham insists in his most recent book, this patient simply refuses to die. Cheetham, professor of art history and director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, introduces us to a robust cache of artists (and there are, as he well admits, many more among their ranks), who for the last forty years have insisted on making this presumably terminal pictorial mode their chief idiom. Abstract Art Against Autonomy… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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David E. James
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 562 pp.; 82 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780520242579)
The questions David James asks in The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geographies of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles begin with a simple problem of space: what is the difference between Los Angeles and Hollywood? Hollywood was once lured to Los Angeles by terrain that could simulate everything from deserts to the Orient, but, as James argues, Los Angeles now tries to create itself in the image of Hollywood. One symptom of this suppression of local geography is that “LA film” has become completely synonymous with “Hollywood film” in the popular imagination. James’s project both continues and revises… Full Review
July 26, 2007
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Midori Yoshimoto
Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 76 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0813535212)
In the context of today’s increasingly global art world, Midori Yoshimoto’s excellent and timely study, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, fills a lacuna in the history of Japanese art in the West as well as in the history of the avant-garde more generally. Into Performance offers fascinating insight into the period between the Zen appropriations of Western artists in the 1950s and the identity art that reigned in the 1980s and 1990s, now so frequently subsumed under the more neutral (or, as some argue, neutralizing) rubric of globalism. The five Japanese women artists who are the… Full Review
June 27, 2007
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Thomas R. H. Havens
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. 312 pp.; 10 color ills.; 24 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0824830113)
In 1968, the Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo dug a perfectly cylindrical hole, 2.7 meters in depth and 2.2 meters in diameter, in a park in Kobe. Next to it, he placed an earthen column of identical dimensions, giving the impression of a simple transfer of matter, a sculpture plucked from the earth. Presenting earth as earth, this work was intended as a negation of the artist’s privileged role as creator, as a critique of the art market, and as a questioning of the modernist art object. This and other works of its generation constituted an attack on modernism that was… Full Review
June 21, 2007
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What do we mean when we say “the nineteenth century”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What does it contain or exclude? How do we make such choices—on what basis? Surveying four major textbooks, this review offers a look back at the ways these questions have been answered over the past two decades, beginning with the first publication of Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson’s 19th-Century Art in 1984 and ending with the second edition of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s Nineteenth-Century European Art in 2006.[1] Although other forms of scholarship (journal articles, monographs, exhibition catalogues, and the like) perform such… Full Review
June 21, 2007
Brian Lukacher
London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. 224 pp.; 49 color ills.; 156 b/w ills. Cloth £40.00 (0500342210)
Enthusiasts for the remarkable work of Joseph Michael Gandy—visionary, perspectivist to Sir John Soane, romantic evoker of the sublime—have been a small but indomitable band. This is the book for which we have been waiting many years. Since the 1970s, Brian Lukacher has been researching the work of Gandy—ferreting out unknown pictures, discovering the anatomy of a life and oeuvre. He knows more than anyone else is ever likely to know about his remarkable and scintillating subject. In short this publication could not be more welcome. Gandy (1771–1843) is in many ways a bit of a sad case. He… Full Review
June 13, 2007
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Christine Ross
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 264 pp.; 67 b/w ills. Paper $27.50 (0816645396)
The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as… Full Review
June 13, 2007
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Rebecca Zorach
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 352 pp.; 16 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $48.00 (0226989372)
Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance offers a wide-ranging study of the elite visual culture of France under the Valois-Angoulême dynasty. In this book, based upon her dissertation at the University of Chicago, Zorach studies the many manifestations of the Fontainebleau style, from panel and wall paintings to sculpture, prints, ceramics, diplomatic gifts and royal entry decorations, costume, and the many copies after the antique that populated the galleries and gardens of the palace. The book’s plentiful, high-quality illustrations exemplify both the author’s arguments as well as the incredible fertility of artistic production… Full Review
June 12, 2007
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Thomas Loughman, ed.
Exh. cat. Milan: Skira, 2006. 176 pp.; 52 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $30.00 (8876249745)
Exhibition schedule: Phoenix Art Museum, December 10, 2006–March 4, 2007
Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, ed.
Exh. cat. Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum in association with Rijksmuseum, 2006. 144 pp.; 104 color ills.; 9 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (1883124239)
Exhibition schedule: Dayton Art Institute, September 30, 2006–January 7, 2007; Phoenix Art Museum, January 27–May 6, 2007; Portland Art Museum, May 26–September 16, 2007
This spring Phoenix, Arizona has become a center for Baroque art. Under the able leadership of James K. Ballinger, Director, and Thomas J. Loughman, Curator of European Art, the Phoenix Art Museum is hosting two major exhibitions of European seventeenth-century art, and for one of these, Phoenix is its sole venue. In the last decade, the museum has organized other major Baroque exhibitions, most notably in 1999 with Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Painting on Copper, 1525–1775; but scheduling two concurrent shows on seventeenth-century art—one focusing on the Mediterranean city of Naples, the other on the Dutch… Full Review
June 12, 2007
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Charles Brock
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 240 pp.; 55 color ills.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0520248724)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, May 7–September 4, 2006; Art Institute of Chicago, October 15, 2006–January 7, 2007; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum), February 20–May 6, 2007
Historians and art historians have a soft spot for Charles Sheeler, the American painter, filmmaker, and photographer who made a career out of his apparent love for industrial modernity during the interwar decades. It is customary for scholars of this period to bend their knees at his Machine Age altarpieces, because they so plainly depict the means and effects of the era’s mania for rational efficiency, and also because—let’s face it—the works are beautiful, all the more seducing in their tight-lipped, standoffish reserve. For Charles Sheeler: Across Media, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name, curator… Full Review
June 12, 2007
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Elizabeth Hartley, Jane Hawkes, and Martin Henig, eds.
Exh. cat. Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries in association with York Museums Trust, 2006. 280 pp.; 250 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (0853319286)
Exhibition schedule: Yorkshire Museum, York, March 31–October 29, 2006
Constantine is the man of the hour. The 1700th anniversary of his ascent into the ruling circle of the Roman Empire, just as the administration of shared authority instituted by Diocletian was about to break apart in civil war, is being celebrated across Europe. Rimini led off in 2005 with an important show and sumptuous catalogue (Angela Donati and Giovanni Gentili, eds., Costantino il Grande: La civiltà antica al bivio tra Occidente e Oriente, Milano: Cinisello Balsamo, 2005). The volume under review here, the catalogue of York’s effort in the fall of 2006, is the second entry in the… Full Review
June 12, 2007
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Lex Bosman
Hilversum, the Netherlands: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004. 176 pp.; 18 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth €25.00 (9065508236)
One can hardly think of Rome without picturing the massive dome of St. Peter’s. Clearly symbolic of Catholicism and, more subtly, of the transition from late pagan antiquity to the ascendancy of Christianity, the basilica has a rich and varied history. As Lex Bosman states in the introduction to The Power of Tradition, “The church of St. Peter’s in the Vatican is not special only because of its size and its splendor. It is also, more than any other building in Western Europe, a testimony to part of the history of Christianity in different types of stone” (9). … Full Review
June 12, 2007
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