Recently Published Reviews

The Art of the Picts marks a lifetime’s collaboration between George and Isabel Henderson, not least on the scholarly front. Isabel became the leading scholar of Pictish art, while her husband George frequently returned to the same subject in his own more wide-ranging studies. Having retired from Cambridge, the Hendersons now live within walking distance of the greatest Pictish cross slab at Nigg, Ross and Cromarty, where they continue to wrestle with the originality and frustrations of Pictish art. For those long steeped in Pictish studies, this joint effort is remarkable for what it does not do. The maps… Full Review

In Japan, Toyo Ito (born 1941) is considered one of the most important figures in post-War Japanese architecture. Based in Tokyo, he has valued both theory and practice, and has used each of them to perceptively articulate the implications of social change. In the 1970s, Ito reflected Japan’s technological enthusiasm, originally calling his firm URBOT, an abbreviation of “Urban Robot.” His work of this period ultimately culminated in Silver Hut, a high-tech aluminum home for his family, where windows were cranked shut by the kind of mechanisms found in automobiles of the time and people sat on airy, expanded-metal chairs… Full Review

It is unusual but probably auspicious for an exhibition to last from January to December, as Tradition and Transformation: Japanese Art 1860–1940 does. Presenting visually compelling images and well-documented histories, the exhibition offers a revealing glimpse into the formative decades of Japan’s emergence as a modernizing nation. The Museum of Fine Arts’ collecting of Japanese art can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, and is deeply indebted to the insight and generosity of a group of Bostonians, including Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Charles Goddard Weld, and Deman Waldo Ross, all of whom traveled… Full Review

Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz navigates the unstable border between art and life. Among his well-known interventions are the ongoing paraSITE series in which he collaborates with urban homeless to design portable housing shelters that can be hooked up to a building’s exterior ventilation system (a working example was included in MoMA’s 2005 exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk) and 2001’s Rise, in which Rakowitz extended a duct from a nearby Chinese bakery into an exhibition space on New York’s Lafayette Street. His current project—a functioning store and import/export business located at 529 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—is his most… Full Review

The Brooklyn Museum’s scholarly catalogue documenting its entire collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century American paintings is a landmark contribution to American art scholarship. Its elegant, clean, and user-friendly design belies the impressive breadth and depth of its content. It is fortuitous—though surely not originally foreseen—that the publication of the book, begun twenty years ago in response to the Luce Foundation’s grants program to support major museum catalogues of American paintings, coincides with the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s Luce Center for American Art. The publication’s extensive entries and data on nearly 700 American paintings by 360 artists make a… Full Review

EAST International, the open-submission exhibition that takes place annually in and around Norwich School of Art and Design, displayed its well-earned self-confidence in 2006, when programming material boasted that, “The trust of artists in the democratic structure of an open exhibition has enabled EAST to become an annual challenge to the expertise of the contemporary art establishment. Not a bad achievement for a small art school gallery in a provincial city.” Perhaps to find this challenge we should look to such galleries in such cities detached from London’s monolithic art establishment (Norwich is in the historic capital of the… Full Review

Architect, historian, and television presenter Ptolemy Dean’s latest book on the work of Sir John Soane (1753–1837) constitutes a significant, intensely researched, and sumptuously illustrated contribution to the study of the late-Georgian British architect. Yet, as with many recent works on Soane, it also emanates something of the incense-filled air of a many-chambered and well-attended shrine wherein every scrap of paper, masonry, woodwork, or glazing that the great man might possibly have laid eyes on is consecrated for the reader’s study and admiration. Its value to Soane scholars and admirers is very tangible; its meaning to a wider public engaged… Full Review

Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting was the closing event of several associated with the exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, June 18–September 17, 2006. Previous events included a Robert H. Smith Curatorial/Conservation Colloquy entitled Venetian Underdrawing at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Among the participants were Paolo Spezzani, X-ray and infrared specialist from Venice; Jill Dunkerton, conservator from London National Gallery; Barbara Berrie and Elizabeth Walmsley of the Washington National Gallery; and Carmen Bambach, curator of the Metropolitan Museum Drawing Department. On… Full Review

Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, an independent scholar and author of numerous publications about Théodore Géricault, develops his thesis not only in the exhibition’s catalogue (which is often the venue reserved for more theoretical art history in the present museum climate) but also, refreshingly, in the thought-provoking, witty, and at times caustic wall texts, brochure, and audio guide commentary. As with any great curatorial eye, Chenique makes… Full Review

One of the first objects encountered upon entering Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was Satellite (1955). This modestly scaled Combine is composed of a sundry collection of materials including a pair of dirty cream-colored socks, two dainty discolored doilies, a strip of worn paisley sheet, sections of cardboard, paint-soaked comic strip broadsheets, and dripping, sensual passages of red, yellow, white, and blue oil paint. This mess of elements is topped off by a swaggering, taxidermied chicken caked in thick oil, who struts defiantly across the paint-encrusted upper ledge of the picture, his downward… Full Review

The Palace Museum, Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, and the Macau Museum of Art have collaborated again to produce a compelling exhibition. The present show follows earlier exhibits on Ba Da Shan Ren with Shi Tao (2004) and one dedicated solely to Dong Qichang (2005). The Macau Museum of Art is one of the premiere locations for exhibitions of art in south China and is the only museum devoted to art in Macau. The present show is under the direction of Chan Hou Seng, the museum’s curator of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. The magnificent artwork of Ming dynasty artists Xu… Full Review

The monumental exhibition The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830, held in the fall of 2004 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, signaled recognition of the tapestry and silverwork masterpieces produced during the viceregal period in the Andes. One of the achievements of the exhibition’s curators, Elena Phipps and Johanna Hecht, and consulting curator, Cristina Esteras Martín, was their ability to obtain from both private collectors and institutions vital objects that had rarely, if ever, been exhibited. The result was a remarkable collection of many of the most significant artistic treasures from the late pre-Hispanic Inca and colonial periods… Full Review

Visitors entering Canaletto in England at the Yale Center for British Art are confronted with two large canvases reunited for the first time in a century: a 1745–46 view of the Molo in Venice on Ascension Day (cat. 54, presumably painted in Venice), and a view of the Thames below Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day a year or so later (cat. 23, painted in London). It is an instructive comparison that sets up the themes of style, subject matter, and patronage explored by this exhibition. The Venetian view features all of the mature vedutista’s familiar hallmarks, with its frontal… Full Review

Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence. Roland Barthes writes a long meditation on photography as a form of counter-memory that ultimately rests on a portrait of his mother that he allows no one to see. Siegfried Kracauer launches his skeptical study of photography and memory by evoking a magazine illustration of the “demonic diva,” whose image lures consumers into the memory-vacuum of an eternal present. And who… Full Review

In the last fifteen years, scholarship on indigenous imagery from colonial Latin America has grown substantially in breadth and sophistication. Across the 1990s, as scholars rejected the dichotomy of resistance to colonial rule versus acquiescence, studies of indigenous agency and creativity became prominent, as did analyses of visual culture and ethnic identity. Recently, as more nuanced understandings of colonial processes have developed (especially in the fields of anthropology and history), interpretive frameworks have again begun to shift. Less crucial is indigenous agency, pure and simple; more pressing questions now concern indigenous practices as constituent of, and pivotal to, colonial society… Full Review