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

David Peters Corbett
University Park and Manchester, UK: Pennsylvania State University Press in association with Manchester University Press, 2005. 256 pp.; 22 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (0271023619)
The concluding dozen pages of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914, spell out two concerns or commitments that underpin, but are not allowed to dominate, the preceding text. First of these is an assertion of the fundamental value of attention to the physical properties of the work of art, to what we actually see, and a renunciation of approaches, notably the social history of art, that tend to look elsewhere. The second is an attack on widespread acceptance of Virginia Woolf’s famous response to Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition that “on or about December… Full Review
February 3, 2006
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Craig Clunas
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. 232 pp.; 63 color ills.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0824827724)
This book is a distinguished addition to a distinguished body of work and an important contribution to studies of the Ming period. By looking at Wen Zhengming’s calligraphy and painting as objects embedded in complex networks of obligation, patronage, and reciprocity, Craig Clunas provides richly detailed new perspectives on familiar events and questions of the period. Although good English-language studies of Wen have been done in the past, this one is a significant advance. It incorporates much recent scholarship in Chinese, including letters and other materials assembled by the contemporary scholar Zhou Daozhen that were not included in the official… Full Review
February 3, 2006
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Oliver Watson
Kuwait: Thames and Hudson in association with Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait National Museum, al-Sabah Collection, 2004. 512 pp.; 900+ color ills. Cloth $65.00 (0500976295)
This deluxe catalogue featuring Islamic ceramics from the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject. Although a few catalogues of Islamic ceramics collections have been published in the twenty-first century (for example, Géza Fehérvári’s Ceramics of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, London: I.B.Tauris, 2000), the exceptional quality and range of the al-Sabah collection set it apart. In the introductory chapters of Ceramics from Islamic Lands, Oliver Watson broaches questions that other cataloguers of private collections might have avoided, namely fashions in collecting, the gulf between the types of… Full Review
January 27, 2006
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David A. Levine and Larry Silver
College Art Association.
H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art: The Western Tradition, 6th rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). 1032 pages; 1326 illustrations, 976 in color. Cloth $95.00 Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 12th ed; 2 vols. (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005). 1150 pages; 1306 illustrations, almost all in color, Paper w/CD-ROM $189.90 Marilyn Stokstad et al., Art History, 2nd rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005). 1264 pages; 1409 illustrations, 1004 in color. Cloth w/CD-ROM $120.00 Frederick Hartt, Art: A History of Painting,… Full Review
January 25, 2006
Felipe Pereda and Fernando Marías, eds.
Madrid: Nerea, 2002. 398 pp.; 309 color ills.; 8 b/w ills. Cloth (848956986X)
One of the joys of archival research is making a discovery. Would that everyone’s could be as significant as the recovery by Felipe Pereda and Fernando Marías of a manuscript atlas of maps and bird’s-eye views of the entire coast of Spain assembled between 1622 and 1634 by the Portuguese cartographer, Pedro Teixeira (alternately, Texeira as used in the volume under review). The atlas survives at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, home also to the impressive collection of views of Spanish cities made for Philip II between 1562 and 1570 by another foreign subject of the Spanish… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Elisabeth A. Fraser
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 286 pp.; 8 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (0521828295)
Elisabeth Fraser’s fine study of the French painter Eugène Delacroix’s early career is as much a work of inventive cultural history as of art history. Reading the paintings that made the artist’s reputation in the 1820s as part of the wider visual culture of post-revolutionary France, she challenges a standard view that equates Romanticism with liberalism and links Delacroix with political opposition to the Bourbon monarchy restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Instead, she highlights his success under royal patronage, and suggests that “Delacroix’s art was as much formed by monarchical rule as it was part of the… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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John House, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, and Jennifer Hardin
Exh. cat. St. Petersburg and Gent, Belgium: Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in association with Snoeck, 2005. 206 pp. $35.00 (9053495452)
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., January 16–April 24, 2005; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, N.Y., May 27–September 4, 2005; Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, Baltimore, Md., October 2–December 31, 2005
At first glance this exhibition seemed misnamed, since, far from focusing exclusively on Monet, it presented a diverse group of dozens of artists and image-makers including European and American painters, printmakers, and photographers, all of whom were fascinated by the River Thames. A catalogue entry by the exhibition organizer, Jennifer Hardin, chief curator at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, explains that the original motivation for the exhibition was the museum’s own Monet, Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog (1903). Unlike this work, the majority of those shown in the exhibition were not Impressionist, and anyone expecting roomfuls of… Full Review
January 23, 2006
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Patricia Meilman, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 388 pp.; 103 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521791804)
Peter Humfrey, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 384 pp.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521662966)
Two of the latest, and unfortunately among the last, additions to the Cambridge Companions to the History of Art series are devoted to Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Together, the two books trace a trajectory from Bellini’s first documented notice in 1459 to the death of his one-time apprentice and eventual rival, Titian, in 1576. Edited by Peter Humfrey and Patricia Meilman, respectively, The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini and The Cambridge Companion to Titian feature new essays by major scholars in the field. Intended as supplements to the standard monographs, they are of interest to specialists and… Full Review
January 17, 2006
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Joachim Pissarro
Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 256 pp.; 92 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (0870701851)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 26–September 12, 2005; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 20, 2005–January 16, 2006; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, February 27–May 28, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art’s Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting is the latest in a spate of recent shows focused on the theme of collaboration between a pair of modern artists.[1] Yet even if the theme and subject it proposes to examine is not new, the body of work assembled and shown together for the first time in this retrospective overview of the nearly twenty-year period that Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were in closest dialogue is undeniably impressive.[2] The three-room exhibition presents nearly one-hundred paintings and a few works on paper, all organized more or less chronologically. As… Full Review
January 16, 2006
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Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, eds.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 378 pp.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521770076)
This latest volume in the Cambridge Companion series is, at its best moments, at the cutting edge of the state of research on the most famous and fabled personality of the early Renaissance in Italy, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337). A team of authors was assembled by editors Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona—themselves both important contributors to Giotto studies—to address two formidable challenges: to capture the verifiable shreds of documentary evidence of this artist’s life and career and to encapsulate the massive critical record on Giotto as an artist. Derbes and Sandona are to be commended for their bravery, especially… Full Review
January 11, 2006
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David R. Coffin
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 242 pp.; 145 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0271022930)
Best known as the architect of the sprawling Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the charming casino of Pius IV on the grounds of the Vatican, the sixteenth-century polymath Pirro Ligorio has not—until now—been the subject of a general-purpose biography. This is surprising considering the range of his accomplishments; beyond architecture, landscape design, and painting, Ligorio’s talents included cartography, the restoration of antique ruins and sculpture, and collecting (his set of ancient medals and coins was said to be one of the very best in mid-Cinquecento Rome). David Coffin, who spent more than half a century studying Ligorio and published the… Full Review
January 11, 2006
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Pieter Biesboer
Waanders, 2004. 144 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9040090068)
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, November 27, 2004–April 4, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich, April 22–August 22, 2005; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 18–December 31, 2005
It is perhaps not surprising that the exhibition of the still lifes of Pieter Claesz. at the National Gallery in Washington is the first monographic show devoted to this artist. As a friend commented on paging through the catalogue, “His works are rather all of a piece, aren’t they?” It is very likely that more than one curator has turned away from the idea of such a show out of concern that the public might find the work too much alike to sustain interest. It is undeniably true that Claesz. devoted most of his career to painting still lifes marked… Full Review
January 10, 2006
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Angela Thirlwell
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 392 pp.; 30 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300102003)
Edwin Becker, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Julian Treuherz
Exh. cat. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. 248 pp.; 130 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0500093164)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, October 16, 2003–January 18, 2004; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, February 27–June 6, 2004
In nineteenth-century England, the artistic Rossetti family gave the world poet-painter Dante Gabriel, poet Christina, and William Michael, an art critic and career civil servant. The bohemian Dante Gabriel has inspired numerous biographies and other anecdotal histories, and his sumptuously painted female “stunners” frequently grace the pages of coffee table books and calendars. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a book complementing the 2003–04 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, is the latest publication on this Pre-Raphaelite artist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a picture book and exhibition catalogue given a scholarly gloss through essays by… Full Review
December 19, 2005
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Patricia Fortini Brown
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 32 pp.; 80 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300102364)
In this well-illustrated and impressively documented volume, Patricia Fortini Brown presents a new kind of history of the Venetian Renaissance home. Unlike most prior studies of domestic architecture, furnishings, and the decorative arts (not often discussed together), this volume reunites architecture with lived experience, form with function, and aesthetic choices with their broader societal implications. Fortini Brown is a masterful social as well as art historian, and her analysis of what it meant to be noble in sixteenth-century Venice prepares the reader for a highly nuanced reading of the palaces that line the Grand Canal. Alert to the paradoxes inherent… Full Review
December 16, 2005
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