Recently Published Reviews

As Victoria’s long reign drew to a close, John Everett Millais, who died in 1896, was probably the most widely popular artist in England, and George Frederic Watts, who lived on until 1904, the most respected. Millais was Sir Henry Tate’s favorite painter, and nine major paintings by him, ranging from the early Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia (1851–52) to later public favorites such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), entered the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897, as gifts of the founder or his widow. Henry Tate owned no works by Watts, but between 1897 and 1903 the artist more than compensated… Full Review

Why do early Netherlandish paintings attract so much high-pressure interpretation? This has been a matter not just of an abundance and complexity of scholarly response, but also a repeated concentration on individual objects. While the gaze of current art history settles more readily on bodies of material (oeuvres, periods, themes, collections, etc.), the scholarship of early Netherlandish art has an abiding, though far from exclusive, taste for deep accounts of single paintings. The question rises anew with the appearance of Bret Rothstein’s Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, which dwells chiefly on four famous works:… Full Review

The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French… Full Review

To Delight the Eye is a charming exhibition of six major paintings and twenty-four drawings donated to the Fogg Art Museum by the Harvard alumnus Charles E. Dunlap (1889–1966). The exhibition, mounted by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., the Jeffery E. Horvitz Research Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Fogg, focuses primarily on artworks produced during the reigns of Louis XV (r. 1715–74) and his successor, Louis XVI (r. 1774–93), but extends into the nineteenth century with drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Clark has authored an accompanying brochure (Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series, no. 48, 2005) that summarizes the… Full Review

Russia! is the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art since the end of the Cold War, and it presents an exciting journey through nine centuries of artistic development. The exhibition is the product of a collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum and three museums in Russia: the State Hermitage Museum, the State Russian Museum (both in St. Petersburg), and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery. Private collections, museums, and galleries in Russia, Europe, and the United States also contributed to the exhibition, which showcases over 250 artworks. Many of the pieces displayed have either rarely, or never, traveled abroad. … Full Review

Over the past year, the United States was fortunate to host two traveling exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts movement: International Arts and Crafts, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, showed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (September 25, 2005–January 22, 2006), and The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880–1920: Design for the Modern World, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, closed its national tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art (October 16, 2005–January 8, 2006). Given the interest in the Arts and Crafts movement generated by these exhibitions, Judith… Full Review

The coast south of Naples is one of the most beautiful and evocative areas of Europe, a dramatic setting for the works of art produced at the height of Amalfi’s importance as a trading center. Jill Caskey’s Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean focuses on the art produced during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the wealthy communities around Amalfi, and her central premise is that these artistic projects exemplify the art of mercatantia: the private churches palaces, pulpits, and doors that are the material expression of the conspicuous and ambitious “getting and spending” of its merchants. Commerce… Full Review

In David Getsy’s account of the “unprecedented and rapid increase in the interest in sculpture” (2) that emerged in late nineteenth-century Britain, the group of artists labeled the New Sculpture movement is given a long-overdue reappraisal. Focusing his study on five artists at the time considered central to the sculptural revival, the author presents detailed analyses of a small number of “imaginative” or “ideal” statues made between 1877 and 1905 by Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Harvard Thomas. Body Doubles is generously illustrated with more than a hundred black-and-white illustrations. Some color plates of… Full Review

Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City brings together twelve commissioned essays, the impetus for which was the conference that accompanied the exhibition, “Florence and the 1470s: Contexts and Contrasts,” curated by Patricia Rubin and Alison Wright in 1999 at the National Gallery in London. It was during this conference that the importance of the recurring concepts of cultural translation and exchange became evident to Campbell and Milner. The volume scrutinizes these aspects of the artistic and intellectual life of Italian urban cultures in the early modern period. The introduction by the editors, in particular, examines the… Full Review

These comments were originally prepared to provoke discussion in a session at the annual College Art Association meetings on Thursday, February 23, 2006, about the needs for a comprehensive textbook for introductory courses in the history of art. They should be read in that light and in tandem with a comprehensive review of ten currently available examples of such textbooks presented by Larry Silver and David A. Levine, Quo Vadis, Hagia Sophia? Art History’s Survey Texts,” also online at caa.reviews. My credentials for speaking here this afternoon are very, very slight. They… Full Review

Art history has never quite known what to do with artists who do not neatly fit into categorical styles or schools of thought. Certainly before the pluralistic 1970s, but especially in the ensuing decades of postmodernism, curators, gallerists, and historians who interpreted art tended to do so by comparing works, seeking points of invention and similarity over difference. Elizabeth Murray is one of those idiosyncratic artists (others, mostly women, come to mind—Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Joan Snyder, and Lee Bontecou) whose work flourished but remained underrepresented alongside more visible and vociferous art historical currents. The Elizabeth… Full Review

Rather than rehearse traditional narratives, Briony Fer’s The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art After Modernism refreshingly shifts the established canon of post-war art by positioning lesser-studied artists like Piero Manzoni, Hanne Darboven, and Agnes Martin in relation to venerated figures such as Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse, and Mel Bochner. Her subject is chronologically circumscribed by what she defines as the period of transition between modernism and postmodernism, formally characterized by the shift away from a collage aesthetic. In modern art, collage carries connotations of the disorder and disintegration of the modern world, exemplified by a seemingly random overlapping of disparate elements… Full Review

Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar is the first major exhibition to feature together the artwork of this mother and two daughters. The fifty mixed-media pieces span over forty years of work (1964–2005) and embody multiple legacies: personal, familial, cultural, and artistic. Overall, the exhibition presents visually provocative and historically significant work, and succeeds in drawing informative connections between the pieces without minimizing each artist’s individuality. The show is co-curated by Jessica Dallow, art history professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Ackland’s Barbara Matilsky, in collaboration with the artists. Instructional materials explore… Full Review

The specter of Michael Fried’s imperious rhetoric looms large over Pamela Lee’s study Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s. Indeed, part 1 of her three-part study and (rather confusingly) the first of its five chapters both bear the title “Presentness Is Grace,” a quote taken from the last line of “Art and Objecthood,” Fried’s now seminal disavowal of “literalist” art, first published in Artforum in 1967. As many have done before her, Lee subjects Fried’s essay to an extended close reading, honing in on the discussion of temporality that motivates Fried’s comparison of Minimalist practice with that… Full Review

Frank Stella’s place in the pantheon of postwar U.S. art is in little doubt. From his appearance in Sixteen Americans (1959) at MoMA until his February 1966 solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery (which received several damning reviews, especially from younger artists like Mel Bochner), Stella was arguably the center of the New York art world. What made him so compelling was the very ambiguity of his art. It was most definitely painting, but it also verged towards the sculptural. So much so that even after praising Stella’s skilled brushwork in her review of his January 1964 exhibition at Castelli… Full Review