Recently Published Reviews

Much history penned by the American generation that came of age during (and since) the 1960s deploys the narrative mode of a struggle between two binaries. Anthony Alofsin’s new history of design education at Harvard University goes so far as to include the word in its title. For Alofsin, the study of what is one of America’s leading institutions for architecture, landscape, and planning education revolves around a struggle for modernism. Importantly, the ultimate outcome of that skirmish was not the various attitudes that followed modernism, sundry posts, and their ilk, but instead an essential hijacking of America’s inevitable professional… Full Review

Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods is a Lacanian-driven contribution to art history and theory. The book does not address problems in the writing of art history, for example, why such writing is prone to monumentalizing artifacts or is crucial in canon formation. Instead, it uses theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to quarantine modern art and art history by taking the special interpretive codes of Freud, and then Lacan, and transferring them to a general code of interpretation. Prosthetic Gods historicizes art history through Lacanian theory. This strategy produces a circularity in which an object, an interpretation thereof, and institutional… Full Review

A mysterious illness spread throughout the United States following the end of the Civil War. Symptoms varied from person to person but generally included diminished powers of concentration, decreased appetite, and overall decline in the level of physical energy. The Boston medical doctor George Beard identified the disease as neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, in 1869 and attributed its sudden appearance to rapid urbanization and industrialization. In the decades following Beard’s diagnosis, the American medical establishment refined the list of symptoms associated with neurasthenia and established a variety of treatments for it, from patent medicines to bedrest to vigorous exercise. Although… Full Review

Manuals and instructional handbooks for artists have been in existence at least since Pliny the Elder’s discussion, in Book 35 of his Natural History, of the history of painting and its materials. Their numbers increased in the twentieth century, as shown by the volumes now in print and by the large number of instructional articles in “popular” artists’ magazines—as opposed to the academic or “serious” artists’ press, where there is either no instruction or, if I may say so, disdain for such a thing. As Leslie Carlyle points out in The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction… Full Review

The medallions on the monumental facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art contain the names of, among other great artists, Rembrandt and Diego Velázquez. But if one looks for the name of the greatest master of the Flemish Baroque, Peter Paul Rubens, one will have searched in vain. Although Ruben’s paintings, oil sketches, and drawings lay within reach of the most important American collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they apparently avoided buying them. For example, Rubens is the only major seventeenth-century painter whose work is not represented in the Frick Collection in New York. This seems… Full Review

Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity analyzes the logic and history of the modern metropolis through the eyes of its most faithful disciple and staunchest critic, the postwar noir film, especially its B variation, where “[t]he loss of public space, the homogenization of everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent” (7). In the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer, Dimendberg is interested in the common, the everyday, and the epiphenomenal, expressions of mass culture that lend us insight into the unconscious logic of late-capitalist reason… Full Review