Recently Published Reviews

Prior to this study and annotated translation by Diana Chou, an Anglophone’s introduction to the person and work of Tang Hou would likely have been Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih’s Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). In that anthology, portions of Tang’s writings were excerpted and arranged thematically under headings such as “On Artists’ Styles” or “On Mounting and Collecting.” One of the significant contributions of Chou’s book is a complete translation. Here, in straightforward prose, we receive Tang’s slightly smug but well-intentioned instructions on how to become a superior judge of painting. We may… Full Review

Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s beautiful and richly illustrated Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in his Culture substantially revises conventional art-historical approaches to this iconic figure. Her book’s achievement is two-fold. First, it provides a way of thinking about Cézanne’s project that is not beholden to the stylistic shift that occurs in his work—between the paint-laden, expressionist, and couillard (“ballsy”) canvases of the work before the mid-1870s and the more neo-classical geometries of his later years—a shift that has largely structured accounts both of Cézanne’s oeuvre as well as of his biography. By avoiding an evolutionary narrative of his career, Kallmyer is sensitive… Full Review

From the moment of its supposed “discovery,” Europeans struggled to understand the Indies as place, a space embedded in networks of social and historical relations and reproduced through imaginative geography. Ilona Katzew’s book, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, derives from and examines visual examples of this tradition of imaginative geography. As with all geographies, this book is formed as a journey with an itinerary that guides the viewer/reader through both visual and textual material in an effort to examine the historical and social topography reproduced through cuadros de casta or casta paintings, a secular genre of painting… Full Review

The marriage of art history and economics, consummated through the study of art markets, has engendered myriad possibilities for the investigation of early modern Netherlandish art. Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. Larry Silver’s entrée into the field not only builds on his own earlier explorations, but also significantly reorients the kinds of questions asked and, by extension, the nature of the answers derived from the study… Full Review

Amid the symphonic blockbusters regularly staged in the large museums of New York City, the special exhibitions mounted at the Frick Collection in three quiet, elegant rooms on the lower level of the museum offer visitors a welcome dose of chamber music. Striking in this regard was the summertime exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century Genevan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, whose spare but penetrating portraits, character studies, and still lifes filled the Frick’s small space with a Mozartian blend of lightness and piercing exactitude. Liotard is perhaps best known today for his pastel figures redolent of genre painting, such as La… Full Review

Scholars of medieval art increasingly are investigating the modern vicissitudes of the objects and architecture they study. There is a wealth of work, for example, on neo-gothic imaginings of the Middle Ages, as manifest in nineteenth-century church restoration projects, the development of museums, and the construction of new buildings in medievalizing styles. But there are relatively few studies of modern attitudes toward manuscript illumination. This is surprising given the fact that contemporary scholars are so deeply indebted to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts for preserving, cataloguing, and inaugurating the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Christopher de Hamel’s examination… Full Review

Dada, a globalized art movement, has in the last ten or so years generated a genuinely global field of research. Once confined in the United States largely to Francophone interests, and in Europe to national domains matched between scholar and subject, Dada is now commonly investigated as an avant-garde tendency that set down roots around the planet. Exhibitions such as Dada Global (Zurich, 1994), Dada: L’Arte della Negazione (Rome, 1994), or the Paris version of the most recent survey, Dada (seen also in Washington, DC, and New York, 2005–2006), include contributions from Antwerp to Tokyo to Zagreb. Parallel to these… Full Review

In the last years of the nineteenth century, a group of glazed stonepaste (also known as fritware) vessels appeared in the showrooms of Europe and the United States. In the early years of the new century, scholars and connoisseurs started to associate the underglaze-painted and luster-painted wares with the ancient city of Raqqa in northeastern Syria. Largely abandoned since the mid-thirteenth century, the great walled city was at the time being repopulated by Circassians who, in the course of removing old bricks to build their houses, were uncovering large numbers of jugs, jars, and bowls. Although the bubble was to… Full Review

Roman architecture has inspired generations of architects, and of its types, temples have been particularly influential. The same was also true in antiquity, and, for that reason, temples, according to John Stamper, tell us a great deal about the religious, political, and social history of the Roman world. But while the Romans built temples throughout the Mediterranean, Stamper focuses only on those of central Rome: their religious, social, and historical backgrounds and their architectural history and relationships He begins with the sixth-century BC Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. From the beginning of the Republic through the late-fourth-century AD,… Full Review

Faute de mieux, the Republican form of government held France together during the last decade of the nineteenth century better than anyone would have guessed. How did art and artists of the period reflect, mediate, and express the major stresses and strains of that decade when the society felt the full impact of modernity? And how can this approach to art and society help bring coherence and meaning to the immense and varied artistic production of the period? These are the two challenges that Richard Thomson sets out to meet in his new book. In answer to these questions… Full Review

The use of mythological subjects in fourth- and fifth-century visual culture has attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years. It has always been accepted that gods and classical myths were commonly represented on late antique mosaics and silverware; the manufacture of statues and statuettes was, however, believed to have died out in the later third century. Recent studies by Niels Hannestad and Marianne Bergmann have demonstrated that small-scale statuettes—if not life-size sculptures—of gods and classical heroes were still produced in the fourth century (Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture: Conservation, Modernization, Production. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994; and Bergmann… Full Review

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of early twentieth-century American art, in no small part due to his extraordinary ability to act at once as a consolidator of boundaries and a boundary-crosser. In his best-known paintings, Hartley presented compelling images of American modernist, regionalist, and nationalist identity, iconic representations that seem to operate within the familiar parameters of place and character, just as they venture creatively beyond them. During the mid-nineteen-thirties, for example, Hartley developed a highly innovative compositional strategy in which he presented regional subjects so familiar that they were virtually interchangeable… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s Odilon Redon show was a quiet triumph. In addition to a much-needed and long-overdue consideration of a major figure within the history of French Symbolism, this intimate exhibition provided a welcome respite from the mall-like spaces of the rest of MoMA’s cavernous emporium of modern art The exhibition was made possible by the Ian Woodner Family Collection donation in 2000 of more than one hundred Redon works on paper and canvas, and its breadth reveals Ian Woodner’s deep commitment to Redon’s work, from the artist’s drawings and charcoal noirs to his illustrated books and later… Full Review

Julie Codell’s study of biographies and autobiographies of artists in Victorian Britain offers a significant addition to the understanding of artistic life in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Focusing on the category of “lifewritings,” she examines the intersection of artistic practice and publicity, showing how these texts both reflected the machinations of the art world and shaped popular conceptions about art’s social roles. Nineteenth-century Britain was obsessed with biography. Narratives of exemplary individuals’ lives were deployed and disseminated across Victorian culture for a variety of political and social ends. This was, after all, the era that produced the daunting sixty-three-volume … Full Review

Meyer Schapiro, eminent mid-twentieth-century scholar of Early Christian, medieval, nineteenth-century, and modern art, gave these six lectures on Insular manuscript illumination in 1968 as the inaugural series of the Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The lectures reflect a segment of Schapiro’s two decades of study on Insular art, most of the results of which were “published” as public lectures in various fora; only three, on specific issues, were sent to press in Schapiro’s lifetime. The impetus to publish the Walls lectures originated with Lillian Schapiro… Full Review