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

Jonathan Bober, ed.
Exh. cat. Milan: Silvana Editoriale in association with Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin and Palazzo Ducale, 2006. 475 pp.; 140 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Paper $65.00 (9780977145386)
Exhibition schedule: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, September 15, 2006–January 14, 2007; Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, March 3–July 8, 2007
The University of Texas’s spacious new Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which opened in April 2006, recently mounted an outstanding exhibition devoted to Luca Cambiaso, the leading native-born figure in sixteenth-century Genoese painting. Organized with the Palazzo Ducale Genoa, this first monographic exhibition in fifty years was supported by a beautifully produced catalogue, in English, edited by Jonathan Bober, the show’s chief architect and the Blanton Museum’s curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings. The volume comprises 118 substantial catalogue entries, each accompanied by a superb full-page color plate, preceded by an excellent fortuna critica, an anthology of… Full Review
June 7, 2007
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Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, eds.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 320 pp.; 50 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300109091)
Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author. Vaughan… Full Review
June 7, 2007
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Jane Geddes
London: British Library, 2005. 136 pp.; 95 color ills.; 6 b/w ills. Cloth £25.00 (0712306773)
It is a sign of the times, I suppose, to begin a book review, itself published online, with a reference to a website. For in many ways, Jane Geddes’s The St. Albans Psalter is a book that was spawned by a website. In 2003, the University of Aberdeen undertook, under the direction of Geddes, to publish the St. Albans Psalter on the internet as a virtual facsimile (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml). As academic websites go, this is a truly impressive accomplishment, for it provides high-quality color images of every page of this twelfth-century psalter (including the blank pages). For the first time… Full Review
May 10, 2007
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Rainer Kahsnitz
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006. 480 pp.; 362 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $150.00 (0892368535)
A generation of Anglophone scholars has depended on Michael Baxandall’s masterwork, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), for its inimitable introduction to the subject of the golden age of German carved altarpieces from around the turn of the sixteenth century. Now, a quarter-century later, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol—perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever produced—reintroduces this material in a translation of the 2005 Hirmer edition, with the usual high production values of that Munich art publisher. In this case, the accompanying text is truly worthy… Full Review
May 10, 2007
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Angela Rosenthal
New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006. 352 pp.; 101 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300103336)
In 1775 an artist named Nathaniel Hone submitted a painting called The Pictorial Conjuror, Displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception (1775) to an upcoming exhibition at the British Royal Academy. The painting depicted in its top left corner an image of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman frolicking naked with other naked artists, among them her friend Joshua Reynolds, who is shown lewdly jabbing his oversized, trumpet-shaped hearing aid in the direction of Kauffman’s parted legs. Hone’s painting was understood by contemporaries to be an attack on Reynolds, the president of the Academy, a mockery of Reynolds’s rumored love affair… Full Review
May 2, 2007
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Irene Earls
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. 240 pp.; 15 color ills.; 26 b/w ills. Cloth $59.95 (0313319375)
For some there is a paradox in the fact that Bob Jones University, a Christian-fundamentalist institution that bills itself as the bastion of “old-time religion” based on the absolute authority of the Bible, should be a repository for one of the best collections of Catholic art in the United States. In the words of Henry Hope, who first introduced the university’s museum to the public (“The Bob Jones University Collection of Religious Art,” Art Journal XXV, no. 2 (1965–66): 154–162), the spirit of the collection is “more that of the Counter Reformation than of Martin Luther” (162). In this respect… Full Review
April 26, 2007
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Michael Cole, ed.
Exh. cat. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 208 pp.; many b/w ills. Cloth (0271029056)
Exhibition schedule: Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, April 14–June 11, 2006; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, July 1–August 19, 2006; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, September 2–October 28, 2006
The Early Modern Painter-Etcher, curated by Madeleine Viljoen, Director of the La Salle University Art Museum, and Michael Cole, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, reexamined art-historical categories. Specifically, it looked at the ways in which painters in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries took up not just any print technique but in particular the technique of etching. The excellent catalogue, with four essays and substantial entries, thoughtfully points out the ways in which etching as a medium was accessible to painters, and the ways in which artists… Full Review
April 25, 2007
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Carmen Giménez and Francisco Calvo Seraller
Exh. cat. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006. 446 pp.; 222 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (8496209733)
Exhibition schedule: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 17, 2006–March 28, 2007
According to the curators of Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History, the dominant themes of Spanish painting can be captured in fifteen categories ranging from art-historical genre (“Bodegones,” or still lifes) to those seemingly made to fit the loans received (“Flyers,” “Landscapes of Fire”). The curators took great—and controversial—license in liberating Spanish painting from the conventions of chronology, school, and patronage that usually provide the foundation for its presentation. However, if the resulting exhibition does not succeed in presenting the masterworks on view in a more memorable way, or in making them somehow more… Full Review
April 25, 2007
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Evonne Levy
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 353 pp.; 109 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0520233573)
A hypothetical reader familiar with the history of twentieth-century Europe but unfamiliar with the art produced in that period would be baffled by the leading survey texts of our day. The three major totalitarian regimes of the century—Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Stalinist Soviet Communism—brought down upon humanity the most severe cataclysm in recorded history. Even the aftermath lasted through the end of the century. Yet our imaginary reader would find little evidence for that in textbooks on art and architectural history. Except for Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Internationall (1919–20) and an occasional reference to the… Full Review
April 24, 2007
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Roger S. Keyes
Exh. cat. New York and Seattle: New York Public Library and University of Washington Press, 2006. 320 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (0925986247)
Exhibition schedule: New York Public Library, New York City, October 6, 2006–February 4, 2007
Because the appreciation of illustrated books requires direct contact between the object and the viewer, it is difficult to make the experience of viewing these books accessible to a wide audience—notwithstanding recent advances in digital “page turning.” Viewing a book is usually a solitary act; at most two people might be able to appreciate a volume at the same time. The images in them are encountered one by one in the sequence determined by the artist but at a pace set by the viewer. When a book is exhibited in a gallery, only one opening per volume may be displayed… Full Review
April 24, 2007
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Pierre Colman and Berthe Lhoist-Colman
Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2003. 342 pp.; 9 color ills.; many b/w ills. Paper €31.00 (2803101890)
[NB: All translations from the text are by the reviewers.] As summarized on the book’s back cover, the authors, Pierre Colman, professor emeritus at the Université de Liège, member of the Classe des Beaux-Arts of the Belgian Acedémie royale d'archéologie, and honorary member of the Commission royale des monuments, sites et fouilles, and his wife, Berthe Lhoist-Colman, art historian, include texts from twenty years of research on the study of the beautiful metal font of Saint-Barthélemy, in Liège, Belgium, a masterpiece of medieval art and probably the best-known baptismal font in the world. The book gathers ten of their… Full Review
David Hill
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 220 pp.; 120 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300107048)
From 1803 to 1805 the English watercolorist John Sell Cotman spent much time in the north of England and Wales under the patronage of a highly agreeable family of landed gentry, the Cholmeleys. In his early twenties at the time, the son of a wigmaker from Norwich, Cotman was eager to continue his sketching tours in the scenic north and Wales, tours that were considered de rigueur for young landscape painters of the day. Previously thought of as a medium for intimate, small-scale, personal, and spontaneous work, watercolor was emerging as a genre worthy of serious attention and respect. Cotman’s… Full Review
April 24, 2007
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Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin
Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. 352 pp.; 60 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $150.00 (075463681X)
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India offers a welcome examination of the work of the many British artists active in India during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century—including Johann Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, Tilly Kettle, James Baillie Fraser, Arthur William Devis, and Robert Home—as well as a double-barreled thesis. The art that these men produced on the subcontinent stimulated the Romantic Movement in England, the authors believe, and, in turn, was transformed into the “cultural imperatives” of the Victorian era in Great Britain, these assertions thereby necessitating a look at artists… Full Review
April 19, 2007
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Amy Reigle Newland, ed.
Boston: Hotei Publishing, 2005. 600 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth $304.00 (9074822657)
Hotei Publishing is a commercial press established in Leiden in the mid-1990s as a specialized publisher of finely designed and beautifully illustrated English language books on Japanese ukiyo-e prints. In recent years it has expanded to publish books on various Japanese arts, mainly of the Edo (1615–1868), Meiji (1868–1912), and Taishō (1912–26) periods. Catering at first primarily to the large numbers of ukiyo-e print collectors in the West, its ukiyo-e publications are nevertheless distinguished by the rigorous scholarship of its authors, both collectors and academics. Consequently, its publications have immensely enriched scholarly understanding of the ukiyo-e tradition. Building on… Full Review
April 19, 2007
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Peter C. Sutton
Exh. cat. Yale University Press, 2006. 256 pp.; 110 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. $65.00 (0300119704)
Exhibition schedule: Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT, December 16, 2006–January 10, 2007; Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam, February 1–April 30, 2007
Of the diverse artistic specialties that developed in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century, architectural painting was the last, fully emerging only during the 1650s. Interior and exterior views of major local buildings—real or imagined—along with depictions of the larger built environment of the rapidly growing Dutch cities allowed artists to celebrate national power and prosperity while examining aspects of visual experience also explored in many landscapes and genre paintings of the period: space and the interaction of solids and voids as revealed within varying conditions of natural light. Particular artistic problems are posed, however, by the need to… Full Review
April 19, 2007
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