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

Aston Gonzalez
John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 324 pp.; 36 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781469659961)
In nineteenth-century America, images were powerful tools in the battle to confront slavery and racial oppression. Aston Gonzalez’s Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century explores how Black artists fashioned radical new imagery that engaged Americans in discussions concerning the politics of race and citizenship. Visualizing Equality focuses on Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, Augustus Washington, and James Presley Ball, artist-activists who played a leading role in their respective communities, alongside William Wells Brown and Henry Box Brown, who brought real-life experiences of enslavement to their projects. Born free, Douglass, Reason, Washington, and Ball… Full Review
September 9, 2021
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Mamadou Diouf and Maureen Murphy, eds.
Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2020. 256 pp.; 55 ills. Paper €24.00 (9782378960988)
Déborder la négritude, despite its compact format, is a trove of rigorous scholarship and a pleasure to read, with striking visual representations of Dakar and its artistic milieu. Edited by Mamadou Diouf and Maureen Murphy, the book offers a series of reflections on the intertwining of art and politics in relation to négritude and the enduring impact of President Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001). As a poet, philosopher, and statesman, Senghor made his mark in Senegal and abroad through his intellectual prowess and political agenda, two distinct legacies that became deeply intertwined over the course of his multifaceted career. In… Full Review
September 7, 2021
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Joe Houston, Frances Follin, Michael J. Anderson, Rosie May, Roja Najafi, Beau R. Ott, and Catherine Shotick
Exh. cat. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2021. 132 pp. Paper $25.99 (9780911919189)
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, February 20–May 16, 2021
Focusing on art forms often seen as mechanical and austere, the exhibition Moving Vision: Op and Kinetic Art from the Sixties and Seventies at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) offered a surprisingly humanistic and sensual take on those two closely related movements. The time is ripe for reevaluation of Op and Kinetic art, which were frequently dismissed by critics of their day due to the perception of the art’s easy consumption, coziness with industry and popular culture, and superficiality (one critic derided Op art as “empty spectacle,” for example). The OKCMOA exhibition countered that assessment by… Full Review
September 3, 2021
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Anna Russakoff
Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 7. Toronto and Turnhout, Belgium: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in association with Brepols, 2019. 212 pp.; 94 ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780888442154)
Within the cult of the Virgin Mary, representations of the Virgin and her miracles in medieval sculpture and painting highlight and reinforce her intercessory powers for devotees. Anna Russakoff’s book Imagining the Miraculous adds to studies of Marian iconography through a focus not on the miraculous objects themselves, but rather on the representations of miraculous images in manuscript illuminations. The illuminations studied are found in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century vernacular French manuscripts containing Marian miracles, including Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame, the anonymous Vie de Pères, Jean de Vignay’s Miroir historial, the anonymous Ci nous dit, … Full Review
September 1, 2021
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Sarah R. Cohen
Material Culture of Art and Design. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. 264 pp.; 10 color ills.; 83 b/w ills. Cloth $115.00 (9781350203587)
In the late 1750s a Parisian publisher brought out a luxury edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, with engravings based on drawings by the great animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Oudry’s design for the fable “The Lion Beaten by the Man” shows a lion in conversation with a group of astonished men in turbans in front of an unstretched canvas hung from a tree depicting a human wrestling a lion into submission. In the accompanying text, the “real” lion remarks that the painter has deceived his human patrons: “We would have in truth prevailed / if my colleagues knew how… Full Review
August 30, 2021
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Claudia Swan
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 336 pp.; 140 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780691207964)
“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” This is of course Frantz Fanon’s famous (and perhaps overquoted, but here I am repeating that sin anyway) diagnosis from The Wretched of the Earth (English translation from Grove Press, 1963, 102). A few sentences earlier Fanon names “Latin America, China, and Africa” as key sites from which “Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries.” Two years later, parallel formational geopolitics were explored in the first two books of… Full Review
August 27, 2021
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Andrew Finegold
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 184 pp.; 88 color ills.; 13 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9781477322437)
In Vital Voids, Andrew Finegold opens, tongue in cheek, by saying that his book is “about nothing.” He then demonstrates—convincingly, and in engaging prose—that the sustained analysis of holes provides insight into the ways in which ancient Mesoamericans conceived of cavities as teeming with vital energies or pregnant with the possibility of emergence. Nothing truly was something for ancient Mesoamericans, but arriving at this conclusion requires skilled art historical analysis on the part of Finegold. Finegold employs a range of methodologies that takes the reader from objects and history to myth, symbolism, and ideology. He begins by contemplating the… Full Review
August 25, 2021
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Katherine Jentleson
Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 264 pp.; 53 color ills.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780520303423)
One gratifying consequence of an increasingly expansive, antiracist art history is the reframing of conventional subfields, allowing us to see familiar artworks with a fresh eye. Yet as Katherine Jentleson claims in her taut, well-argued Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, the subfield, or even just the label, of so-called self-taught art has always made simple categorization difficult and continues to do so, as artists trained in settings beyond academic institutions gain more visibility. Recent high-profile exhibitions such as “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (2013), Outliers and American… Full Review
August 19, 2021
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Jesper Meijling and Tigran Haas, eds.
Trans. Julie Martin. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2020. 300 pp.; 60 color ills. Cloth $30.00 (9789198523690)
This compendium offers a wide-angle view of the life and work of activist and writer Jane Jacobs (1916–2006). The volume, edited by Jesper Meijling and Tigran Haas, consists of fifteen chapters interspersed with carefully selected full-page images drawn from both Jacobs’s work and wider contexts. Through these images and the short, provocative essays, the book asks the reader to reconsider the work of Jacobs in a contemporary context in relation to how we read and understand cities. Beyond a eulogy or simple celebration, therefore, the texts suggest fresh insights, open up new questions, and develop an original set of critiques. … Full Review
August 18, 2021
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Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February 1–December 31, 2021
After Hope is a groundbreaking exhibition that rethinks not only the importance of contemporary video art in Asia but also the premises and goals of its exhibition site, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, whose main focus is traditional Asian art. The physical installation of the show comprises a six-and-a-half-hour loop of fifty-four videos and an “ephemera wall” of texts and images contributed by the artists. While the physical installation of the exhibit runs through December 31, 2021, a thought-provoking program of working groups, workshops and events, and a continually updated digital platform, afterhope.com, have been organized since… Full Review
August 16, 2021
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Andrei Pop
Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2019. 320 pp.; 15 color ills.; 101 b/w ills. Cloth $32.95 (9781935408369)
How welcome it is to read a book, manifestly about fin-de-siècle Symbolism, whose ambitions are to parse communication itself. Andrei Pop’s A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century traces allied concerns among artists, scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians about the incommensurability of private thought and public expression and the symbol as an agent within those realms. The book argues that Symbolism arose from crises of confidence in knowledge production in Western philosophy and the sciences. While this is not a new claim, the insight that Pop offers is that Symbolism may be understood as a… Full Review
August 13, 2021
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Celeste Brusati, ed.
Trans. Jaap Jacobs. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020. 424 pp.; 24 b/w ills. Paper $75.00 (9781606066676)
Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: Anders de zichtbaere werelt (1678) is one of the most important sources for Dutch seventeenth-century art practice and art theory. The book has been frequently mined by art historians to support interpretative arguments on a variety of subjects, but few scholars have read Van Hoogstraten’s magnum opus cover to cover. The original text is difficult to understand, even for those well trained in seventeenth-century Dutch, due to its idiosyncratic vocabulary, highbrow writing style, and the abundance of quotations from antique and early modern sources. Jan Blanc’s Introduction à la haute… Full Review
August 11, 2021
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Thierry De Duve
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 248 pp.; 17 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9780226546735)
Ever since his Kant after Duchamp (1996), Thierry de Duve has proved himself to be one of the most insistent Kantians today. Quite appropriately, the cover of his recent book, Aesthetics at Large, Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics, shows us a button telling us that “Kant Got It Right.”  De Duve’s Kant, however, is not the one who, in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard’s proposed reading, might be taken to suggest that the sublime holds the key to the momentum of the avant-garde; rather, he is the one who aspired to produce a theory of sensus communis as the… Full Review
August 10, 2021
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Allison Deutsch
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. 216 pp.; 25 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $94.95 (9780271087238)
Georges Seurat’s monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884, Art Institute of Chicago) hung alongside paintings by Camille Pissarro and newcomer Paul Signac at the last Impressionist exhibition. Those who visited in May 1886 encountered a new painterly mode called “néo-impressionisme” as defined by Félix Fénéon. With their pointillist technique, Neo-Impressionists applied tight dabs of unblended paint, rather than employing the push-and-pull of the gestural, colorful strokes of the Impressionist painters. Complementary hues—red lake and viridian green, for example—appear side by side in pointillist imagery. These painters believed that those dabs of color mixed optically so that… Full Review
August 6, 2021
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Nina L. Dubin, Meredith Martin, and Madeleine C. Viljoen
Exh. cat. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020. 158 pp.; 120 color ills. €50.00 (9781912554515)
In the late 1710s the French and English governments sought to tackle their respective national debts by promoting share trading in state-controlled joint stock companies: the French Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West), also known as the Mississippi Company, and the English South Sea Company. In 1720 spectacular rises in share prices spread from the French to the English and eventually to the more diversified Dutch financial markets. Each of these bull markets was soon followed by a dramatic collapse in the value of shares. Together these three “bubbles” generated the first international stock market crash and ushered in the… Full Review
August 4, 2021
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