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

Ikumi Kaminishi
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. 246 pp.; 12 color ills. Cloth $54.00 (0824826973)
A much-needed book in Japanese art history, Ikumi Kaminishi’s Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan, an analysis of the performative art of “picture deciphering,” or etoki, is also essential to anyone studying the uses of images in society. Covering the gamut of disciplines from art history to ethnography to religion, Kaminishi’s book is a good attempt at interdisciplinary practice and how that practice can be used to uncover the overlays of human imagination in the use of visual images. Kaminishi explains that once etoki is understood as serving as propaganda, it will… Full Review
September 6, 2006
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A. Joan Saab
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 240 pp.; 51 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (0812238184)
In the last two decades, scholars in art history, cultural history, and American studies have produced a host of important texts examining the once aesthetically maligned decade of the 1930s, according it a dignified place in the history of American visual production. In expanding this historiography, scholars have developed new historical and cultural explanations for images, including their content, settings, and audiences. Armed with contextual methods, with postmodern identity theory, and highly sensitive to period culture, politics, economics, and institutional constraints, writers have interpreted murals, prints, easel paintings, photography, and design. In these studies we learn of the workings of… Full Review
September 6, 2006
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Jonathan Bikker
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 224 pp.; 20 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0300105819)
Writing a catalogue raisonné has become one of the most thankless tasks in art history. The inseparable association of this type of scholarly publication with the traditional valorizing of the individual master (even when not labeled a “genius”) makes many readers look askance at such catalogues. Moreover, the results of one individual’s evaluative process of connoisseurship are often seen as overly subjective, not that the results of group connoisseurship, as with the Rembrandt Research Project, have fared much better. Yet the catalogue raisonné still thrives as a scholarly genre, and many—academics, curators, dealers, collectors, and amateurs—depend on its contributions These… Full Review
August 8, 2006
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Victor M. Schmidt
Florence: Centro Di, 2004. 352 pp.; 250 ills. Cloth €60.00 (8870384276)
In this elegant publication, Victor Schmidt surveys small Tuscan panel paintings from the duecento and trecento in order to search for the answer to a single question: How did such works function when they were originally created? While a wide variety of such works survives from this period, they are largely without context; information on patronage and provenance for small panels is sparse, as is documentary evidence on usage. Schmidt’s most basic body of evidence is the panels themselves, which demonstrate a wide variety of type and of iconography Especially problematic is the lack of information on the patrons and/or… Full Review
August 8, 2006
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Kristin Lohse Belkin and Fiona Healy
Exh. cat. Antwerp: Rubenshuis & Rubenianum, 2003. 342 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Cloth $87.95 (9076704694)
David Jaffé and Elizabeth McGrath
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 208 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (1857093712)
As an exhibition, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector provided the unique experience of showing a substantial portion of Rubens’s personal art collection within his own house. When I visited the exhibition for the first time, a pail and mop lay inadvertently forgotten in a corner, further adding to the domestic atmosphere. Rarely is an exhibition as perfectly suited to its setting, and for this apt pairing the curators Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy deserve to be congratulated. The catalogue cannot duplicate the in situ experience, but it provides the important alternative perspective of tracking the transformation of the… Full Review
August 7, 2006
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Janet Abramowicz
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 288 pp.; 41 color ills.; 71 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300100361)
Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating… Full Review
August 7, 2006
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Caroline Jones
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 544 pp.; 23 color ills.; 127 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0226409511)
The last word on the history of the New York School is far from having been written. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses announces a new chapter in the study of mid-century art and criticism by attempting to conclude one. At the end of her preface, Caroline Jones reveals, “More than anything else I’ve written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it” (xxix). Her central claim is that Greenberg’s art criticism served to limit and reduce experience to the visual, which, in the process… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Xavier F. Salomon
The Frick Collection, 2006. 56 pp.; 32 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper (0912114312)
Frick Collection, New York City, April 11–July 16, 2006
Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review
August 2, 2006
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Allen Hockley
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 336 pp.; 8 color ills.; 51 b/w ills.; 59 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0295983019)
Allen Hockley’s long-awaited monograph on Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan’s eighteenth-century print culture. Not only does he focus on one of the too-long neglected masters of the period, he also presents a fine analysis of some of Koryūsai’s major themes as well as his best-known series of single prints, Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves. That this study is, indeed, long overdue can be inferred from the fact that Koryūsai has received little scholarly attention in spite of the sheer number of designs for which he was responsible. As… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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Mark Coatzee and Laura Edward Heon
Miami and North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2006. 143 pp.; 27 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth (0971634149)
MASS MoCA, March 19, 2005–March 31, 2006; SITE Santa Fe, April 21–June 19, 2006; Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC, September 5–October 29, 2006; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, February 16–June 3, 2007; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, June 23–September 30, 2007
Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review
August 1, 2006
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Exhibition schedule: Istanbul, Turkey, September 16–October 30, 2005
The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review
July 25, 2006
Exhibition Schedule: Tate Britain, London, February 4–May 7, 2006
With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review
July 19, 2006
Andrew Schulz
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 255 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780521821056)
Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799), a series of eighty etchings and aquatints, are widely known as satiric criticisms of human ignorance and folly. The artist is democratic in his critical assessment of society and its customs, from the superstitious beliefs of the lower classes to the genealogical obsession of aristocrats. Although the series includes themes particular to Spain at the turn of the century, Goya often veils these fixed references with ambiguous meanings, settings, and figures. Thus, many of the critiques expressed pictorially by Goya have application for locations and times outside of late-eighteenth-century Spain, giving the series a… Full Review
July 13, 2006
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Christopher B. Donnan
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. 220 pp.; 258 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (0292716222)
Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review
July 5, 2006
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