Recently Published Reviews

In graduate school, a fellow student once told me, “Rosalind Krauss exists for you to react against.” In his recent book, David Carrier assumes a similar stance, portraying Krauss as a critic who is brilliant, provocative, and constantly refining her ideas in order to challenge accepted beliefs. Carrier works from the premise that Krauss’s rise in the post-Greenberg era parallels the rise of American philosophical art criticism, and that the story of both offers insight into the contemporary art world. He states clearly that it is not his intent to gossip about his subject; instead he relies solely on Krauss’s… Full Review

This book, published to accompany the touring exhibition of ninth- to thirteenth-century south Indian bronzes that opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., follows the trend of recontextualizing works of Indian sculpture that began with the Asia Society exhibition, Gods, Guardians, and Lovers: Temple Sculptures from Northern India, A.D. 700–1200 (1993). These bronze figures of deities and saints are examined against the backdrop of the religious and literary world in which they were created and used, when the Chola dynasty dominated the Tamil Nadu region of south India. It seems remarkable that these exquisite works… Full Review

See Bernd Nicolai’s review of this book “All nationalist architecture is bad, but all good architecture is national.” Bruno Taut, 1938. The formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk may be seen as one of the most radical and revolutionary moments in twentieth-century world history. With it came the end of the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman imperium, the abolishment of Islamic law, or shari’a, and the cultural transformation of a region spanning from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Istanbul to Diyarbakir.… Full Review

Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) of Bologna was among the most important ecclesiastical reformers and writers on sacred art in post-Tridentine Italy. After receiving a degree in canon law from the Studio di Bologna in 1546, he was appointed an uditore di Rota in Rome in 1556. He subsequently served as the Rota’s counselor to the papal legates during the final session of the Council of Trent (1561–63). Pope Pius IV appointed Paleotti to the Congregation of the Council to study the approval and implementation of Trent’s decrees, which the Congregation issued in print in 1565. In March 1565, Pius elevated Paleotti… Full Review

The concept of difference unites the essays in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Though comprised of six papers from a day-long seminar at the 1998 International Congress at Leeds, this collection arrives in two parts: essays by Jane Hawkes and Catherine E. Karkov look at relatively little-known examples of Anglo-Saxon eighth and ninth-century sculpture, and contributions by Fred Orton, Richard N. Bailey, Ian Wood, and Éamonn Ò Carragáin engage in an often-argumentative conversation about approaches to the two best-known early-Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures, the monuments at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. The benefit of the collection lies in the chance for the contributors… Full Review

Jay DeFeo and The Rose is the long-awaited monograph dedicated solely to this artist and her best-known painting. Its eleven essays from a prestigious roster of authors work together to situate DeFeo’s achievements within American postwar art, and its thirteen color plates and seventy-eight black-and-white photographs sustain these texts and enhance the reader’s experience. Challenging art-historical essays by her biographer Richard Cándida-Smith and art critic Carter Ratcliff are particularly significant contributions to the body of DeFeo scholarship. The inclusion of Lucy Lippard, whose essay positions the artist within the context of the critic’s previous writing, is impressive. The… Full Review

In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius provides the earliest surviving account of the origins of what we have called, since the Renaissance, the orders of Greek architecture. Vitruvius, however, wrote during the early years of the Roman Empire—some six hundred years after the orders first developed—and his first-hand experience of early Greek architecture must have been limited at best. The numerous Greek treatises on architecture that he had at his disposal and to which he routinely refers in his writings were for the most part relatively late, dating by and large to the Hellenistic period, again, long after… Full Review

Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips’s Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective is a curious book: while largely synoptic, written by two nonspecialists who rely heavily on previously published research, it also constitutes an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the reception of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings among contemporary viewers. Issues of audience response have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. The authors take their cue from the likes of Alison Kettering and Elizabeth Honig, among others, who have already investigated questions of audience reception vis-à-vis seventeenth-century Dutch art. But although Muizelaar and Phillips… Full Review

Paul Joannides’ elegantly written and superbly illustrated book constitutes a significant addition to the study of Renaissance art history. With substantial attention given to the vast body of earlier opinion—both recent and remote—he embraces the challenge of early cinquecento Venetian painting, an arena of far-reaching innovation but one that is exceptionally vexed with unresolved questions of authorship and date. The subject is therein vulnerable to speculation and subjectivity concerning directions of influence among the major protagonists and their responses and contributions to humanist culture and to Central Italian and Northern European art. Always keeping in sight the complexity of this… Full Review

During the last three decades, the topic of the female nude and its spectatorship has frequently been discussed. In fact, this issue has played a major role in far-reaching reevaluations by feminist and social art history as well as by studies in other fields. Although scholars have addressed the nude and spectatorship in relation to art of the nineteenth century and to the institutional barriers that limited women art students’ access to studying from nude models, most of these investigations have tended to focus on a particular artist, group of artists, theme, or institutional framework. Building on this body of… Full Review

While a handful of exhibitions have looked at the relationship between African Americans, Asians, and Asian Americans in visual art, such as Ancestors, a joint effort by Kenkeleba House and the Asian American Arts Centre in 1995, Black Belt is the largest exploration to date. As the title implies, it is structured around the premise of a cross-cultural fascination with Asian martial arts epitomized by the messianic icon Bruce Lee. Yet despite the backing of a thriving institution and the obvious energy and optimism on the part of the artists and curator Christine Y. Kim, the exhibition is disappointing… Full Review

Maryvelma Smith O’Neil’s Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome is the first monograph in English on this important but relatively unstudied artist. In five interpretive chapters accompanying a handlist of works, the author aims to raise the standing of Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) in modern art history through a consideration of his artistic development—as painter and as draftsman—within a social and institutional context. In addition to this already ambitious project, O’Neil considers Baglione’s literary production: Le nove chiese (1639) and Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (1642). A book of this scope has long been… Full Review

Most of what remains of Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s collection of drawings—a collection that he referred to as the Museo Cartaceo (or “Paper Museum”)—survives as loose sheets and bound volumes in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and the British Museum in London. The surviving works include drawings of mineral samples, plants and animals from Mexico, and more familiar fauna and flora. In addition, there are more than 2,300 representations of ancient monuments and objects. Perhaps in response to a perceived overspecialization in contemporary academia, Dal Pozzo’s collection has been the object of much scholarly interest in the past two decades. After… Full Review

Published to accompany the first monographic exhibition of Hendrick Goltzius’s dazzling prints, drawings, penwercken, and paintings, this catalogue consists of a useful biographical sketch followed by brief essays and entries describing successive phases of the artist’s career. The book aims, in the words of the directors of the three host institutions, “to present a comprehensive and balanced picture of Hendrick Goltzius as a draughtsman, printmaker, and painter” (5). Given this stated objective, we might well ask what impression of the artist the visitor to the exhibition and reader of the catalogue are invited to form. Deeply susceptible to artistic… Full Review

Patricia Ann Berger’s Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China is not just the first monograph on court art of this period in Western language, but also a much-needed contribution to the study of Manchu court culture in general, an area enjoying something of renaissance in the last decade. Like recent publications by cultural historians, Berger’s work could be read as contrasting the “cynical” view on Manchu rulers, a view that dismisses the emperors’ cultural projects or religious practices as purely political manipulation or that explains them as a result of the rulers’ personal obsession with… Full Review