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

Nezar AlSayyad, Irene A. Bierman, and Nasser Rabbat, eds.
Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. 272 pp. Paper $27.95 (0739109162)
Making Cairo Medieval addresses the urban and architectural evolution of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interest in this topic has increased considerably over the past two decades, and this book is a recent example of this interest. For quite some time, a major source for the investigation of this subject remained Janet Abu Lughod’s highly regarded Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), even though the work addressed the overall evolution of Cairo, and its chronological scope therefore extended beyond the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since then, a number of publications… Full Review
May 11, 2006
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Ann Yonemura
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2006. 251 pp. Cloth (1588342395)
Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan, October 25–December 4, 2005. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. March 4–May 14, 2006
Though he is best known in the West as a master of landscape printmaking, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) not only designed prints of every subject, he also illustrated books and painted works ranging from formal screens and hanging scrolls to studies and sketches. The previously limited view of his art as a printmaker will be overturned by this exhibition, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to view the full range of Hokusai’s painting and to fully appreciate the diversity and talent of this major master of ukiyo-e. Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) assembled an unmatched collection of paintings by Hokusai, and this… Full Review
May 3, 2006
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Nihon Keiza Shimbun, Inc. and Yuriko Iwakiri, eds.
Japan: Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2005. 400 pp. Paper (1588342395)
Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan, October 25–December 4, 2005. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. March 4–May 14, 2006
The historic exhibition Hokusai contains almost 500 works (about 310 woodblock prints, 130 paintings, 40 published books, and 20 drawings) by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), arguably the best-known Japanese artist outside Japan and the creator of the Great Wave (ca. 1831). According to the Tokyo National Museum press materials, there had been one other Hokusai exhibition of this scale, which was in Vienna in 1901. However, the exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum reflected a century of subsequent international scholarship. The exhibition follows a more focused Hokusai: Prints and Drawings (1991) at the Royal Academy of Art, London, with 133 prints… Full Review
May 3, 2006
Garth Fowden
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 390 pp.; 73 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780520236653)
Qusayr ‘Amra is perhaps the most enigmatic of the so-called Umayyad “desert castles” that inhabit the landscape of the Syro-Jordanian steppe and the more arid regions to the east of it. These “castles,” or qusur as they are commonly referred to in Arabic, are in fact residences, bathhouses, hunting lodges, and farms built by the elites of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 CE). Built sometime in the first half of the eighth-century CE, Qusayr ‘Amra consists of a bath complex (a large hall and three small bathing rooms), a deep stone well, a cistern, and a hydraulic installation with a waterwheel… Full Review
April 11, 2006
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Richard Thomson, Phillip Dennis Cate, and Mary Weaver Chapin
Exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 308 pp.; 370 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. $39.50 (0691129045)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 20–June 12, 2005; Art Institute of Chicago, July 16–October 10, 2005
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre was the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since the 1991–92 retrospective in London and Paris. It was also the first large-scale show of both his paintings and prints in the United States in more than twenty-five years. In contrast to its predecessors this show focused on a single theme—the relationship of Lautrec’s art to Montmartre, the bohemian and lower-class Parisian district where he worked and where he found his characteristic subjects. The accompanying volume provides substantial documentation and analysis in support of the exhibition’s mission of setting the artist’s work in its socio-historical… Full Review
April 11, 2006
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Juergen Schulz
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 368 pp.; 218 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (0271023511)
Juergen Schulz’s varied and rich career has been capped by a book that can only be termed revolutionary. Venetian scholarship has clung to the idea that the Venetian palace is a Byzantine import. Venice was closely tied to Byzantium politically for much of its early history, and it has seemed logical to assume that the East provided the city with its architectural models. That Byzantine or Byzantine-style embellishments—what Schulz terms, in a marvelous phrase, “borrowed finery of pseudo-antique grandeur”—were the decoration of choice for early Venetian palaces seemed to clinch the matter. The issue has been compounded by the early… Full Review
April 5, 2006
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Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez
Gijón and Oviedo: Museo Casa Natal de Jovellanos in association with KRK Ediciones, 2003. 668 pp.; 406 b/w ills. Cloth (8496119319)
A large number of beautifully illustrated catalogues of Spanish drawings have been published in the last ten years, many to accompany exhibitions, as the more fragile treasures of Spanish art are being studied and brought to a wider audience. The Catálogo de la Collección de Dibujos del Instituto Jovellanos de Gijón stands apart from this group, as it is a reprint and enhancement of a catalogue first published in 1969 by a pioneer in the study of Spanish drawings, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Before its demise, the Jovellanos collection of drawings had been catalogued by Jesús Menéndez Acebal in the… Full Review
March 30, 2006
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David Moos, ed.
Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005. 124 pp.; 39 color ills. $34.95 (1894243455)
Exhibition Schedule: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June 1–August 7, 2005
Louis Grachos and Claire Schneider
Exh. cat. Buffalo: 132 pp.; 114 color ills. Cloth $40.00 (1887457062)
Exhibition schedule: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, July 15–October 2, 2005 Louis Grachos and Claire Schneider.
This past summer, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, inspired by the history and legacies of their collections and even the buildings that house them, focused on abstraction—each with a major exhibition and accompanying publication: The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950–2005 at the AGO and Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox. Responding to a bemused critic in a statement to the New York Times on June 13, 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, assisted by Barnett Newman, declared: “To us art is an adventure… Full Review
March 30, 2006
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Penelope Curtis, ed.
Leeds: Henry Moore Institute in association with Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005. 140 pp.; 45 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $62.95 (1900081393)
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, September 23, 2004–March 27, 2005
The recent exhibition, Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, focused on early fifteenth-century Italian relief sculptures from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Organized by Peta Motture, Glyn Davies, and Stuart Frost at the museum and by Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, and Stephen Feeke of the Henry Moore Institute, it was the first exhibition to focus on Italian early fifteenth-century relief sculpture, and it presented the subject in a provocative and innovative way. Its specific purposes were to explore how the sculptures might be… Full Review
March 30, 2006
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Amanda Lillie
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 370 pp.; 184 b/w ills. Cloth $90.00 (0521770475)
The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative… Full Review
March 24, 2006
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Lianne McTavish
Burlington, Vt. and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. 272 pp.; 29 b/w ills. Cloth $89.95 (0754636194)
Lianne McTavish’s book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, is part of an Ashgate series entitled Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, a group of collected essays and single-authored volumes that investigate subjects as diverse as identity politics, widowhood, and the book trade. Ashgate is, indeed, one of the few publishing houses still willing to produce these sorts of studies, especially in the form of collected essays, and we are indebted to them for their efforts to bring new studies of women and gender into the scholarly realm. Like the other books in… Full Review
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Philippe Bordes
Exh. cat. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 400 pp.; 80 color ills.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300104472)
Exhibition schedule: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, February 1–April 24, 2005; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, June 5–September 5, 2005
Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by… Full Review
March 15, 2006
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Claudia Swan
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 256 pp.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth (0521826748)
It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family… Full Review
March 15, 2006
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Wu Hung
Chicago: University of Chicago Press in association with Reaktion Books, 2005. 240 pp.; 60 color ills.; 133 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0226360784)
Wu Hung, Chinese born, has become a well-known U.S. art historian. Author of a number of distinguished books discussing the art of his native country, in Remaking Beijing he tells the history of Tiananmen Square, the gate to the Imperial Palace. Every tourist who goes to Beijing visits this central site. Coming from the east, you go north to buy a ticket and enter the Forbidden City. But if you walk south just before entering the Square, you reach the Museum of Chinese History, which now contains displays of art and a waxworks exhibition showing the communist rulers, various emperors… Full Review
March 13, 2006
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Oliver Leaman
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 211 pp. Paper $25.00 (9780268033699)
Over a century of scholarship in Islamic art has produced numerous monographs, catalogues, and surveys; yet until recently, only a few studies have been published on the aesthetics of Islamic art. The last three decades, however, have seen several books and exhibitions that claim to deal with the “common principles,” “aesthetics,” and “philosophy” of Islamic art. Oliver Leaman’s book is both a contribution to and a critique of this particular tradition Although according to Leaman his book is intended to “establish a solid foundation for the aesthetics of Islamic art” (vii), the book is in fact not solely focused on… Full Review
March 13, 2006
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