Recently Published Reviews

The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China is a well-illustrated and handsomely produced volume that presents itself as a survey of the development and transformation of the Chinese calligraphic tradition in the modern era (defined here as the roughly fifty-year period from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the century). Despite its grand ambitions, however, the book turns out, upon closer inspection, to be something far more limited: namely, a catalogue published to accompany an exhibition entitled Brushes with Surprise: The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, held at the British Museum in… Full Review

Valentin Groebner’s latest book, his fourth, is nothing if not timely. An engaging (but also slightly uneven) series of studies involving ways in which bodies, and markings upon bodies, carried meaning and acted as the ground for physical violence in late medieval Europe, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages treats a subject that stands more or less at the center of discussions involving Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, the photographs of charred corpses in Fallujah, Iraq, and images of naked prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. Importantly, this connection is not… Full Review

Suzaan Boettger’s recent book is an attempt to write a comprehensive social art history of the short-lived movement known as Earthworks. It has many good features and a number of bad ones; all are inherent in the book’s founding premise, namely that such a movement existed in the first place. The historical material that Boettger very ably presents is quite interesting. It includes detailed and well-researched accounts of important exhibitions, such as the Earth Art show at Cornell University in 1969 and the foundational EARTH WORKS exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968. She also handles the… Full Review

We know a great deal about Michelangelo: we have his poetry, his letters, the biographies written by Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari—individuals who knew him well—and many comments made by friends, acquaintances, and enemies. Of course we also have his art and architecture, which we can assess with our own eyes. That art, studied in relationship to the sixteenth-century writings about the artist’s life and his works, offers a rich heritage that is still open to new interpretation, despite decades of scholarship on the topic. This volume, which publishes three lectures—“The Metamorphoses of Marble,” “The Finger of God,” and “The… Full Review

Winner of CAA’s 2004 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Two types of publication, kept quite separate in the past, are brought together in John Beldon Scott’s sumptuously produced book: a “shroud” literature, or “Sindonology” (the local, devotional, and scientific literature around the relic), and a “chapel” literature, focusing on Guarino Guarini’s housing for the shroud, a black marble–clad chapel long considered wildly enigmatic. While the “shroud” literature may smack to some of incense, Scott discovered that it is, in one respect, more clear-sighted than much art-historical literature, which had turned a blind… Full Review

In his 1568 Life of the Florentine painter Jacopo Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari describes how Michelangelo executed a full-size drawing or cartoon for his patron Bartolomeo Bettini, a merchant-banker, which showed: a nude Venus with a Cupid who is kissing her, in order that he might have it executed in painting by Pontormo and place it in the center of a “chamber” of his own, in the lunettes of which he had begun to have painted by Bronzino figures of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, with the intention of having there all the other poets who have sung of love … Full Review

Steven Harris’s new book on Surrealism is excellent. It is refreshing to see the politics of Surrealism properly acknowledged, and, at the same time and as part of the same argument, to see the aesthetics that underwrote those politics correctly assessed. In Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche, Harris tracks an extremely rich and nuanced discourse between Surrealism and the French Left, a series of debates virtually unknown in Anglophone culture; he also nicely lays out his arguments in clear and readable prose. But the real issues at stake in this discourse are… Full Review

Shelley Hales’s The Roman House and Social Identity is an important contribution to the study of domestic architecture in general and, more specifically, to our understanding of the politics of identity in the Roman Empire. Her overall purpose is clear from her introduction: to examine domestic art and architecture from the imperial period so that we might “begin to appreciate the complexities of building a Roman identity and the power of the art of impression to overcome them” (7). Combining the studies of literature, rhetoric, architecture, art, archaeology, and politics, Hales creates an accessible and readable text that will be… Full Review

The present study, the fruit of decades of painstaking and dedicated research by a distinguished team of husband-and-wife scholars, focuses on the commercial fabrication of manuscripts in Paris from the early thirteenth century to the rise of printing at the end of the fifteenth century. A 322-page analytical text in twelve chapters, 29 figures, 8 maps, and 80 pages of endnotes fill the first volume. Volume 2 contains a biographical register of some 1,200 men and women active in the medieval Parisian book trade, appendices to each of the study’s twelve chapters, 182 illustrations on coated stock, a full… Full Review

In the introduction to Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618–960, Sarah Fraser describes her project as an inquiry into the medieval artist’s practice through close analysis of several of the sixty-five ink sketches from the ninth and tenth centuries that were preserved in the sealed Cave 17 of the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang and are now mostly in the British Museum in London and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The author examines the relationships between the sketches and the finished murals and silk banner paintings from the ninth-… Full Review

Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum effectively presents the dominant present-day academic ways of understanding museums and contains a range of material not duplicated in any other volume. And considering its length, the book is reasonable in price. The editors’ introductions are lucid, and the essays, which consider a range of topics, are strong. I will begin this review by briefly summarizing the subjects of the essays in the various parts of the book and then offer my evaluation of the volume as a whole. In the first section, which addresses the rhetoric of historiography, Hayden White argues… Full Review

Bram Dijkstra’s book American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920–1950 convincingly constructs a new category of expressionism that he sets apart from early-twentieth-century German Expressionism and mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism. “American Expressionism” combines modernism and realism to address compassionately a range of social issues. Dijkstra examines this art, created largely in the United States during the Great Depression, as a “venture into socialist cultural politics” (12). His thesis is that American Expressionist art was produced primarily by immigrants, the children of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe (mainly Jewish), and “forced immigrants” (or African Americans) (12–13). Dijkstra’s book includes ten chapters.… Full Review

The Belvedere statue court is still widely regarded as one of the “first” antiquities collections in Renaissance Rome, but Sara Magister, in articles published in Xenia Antiqua (1999 and 2001), has identified more than 160 families in Rome who collected ancient works of art before Giuliano della Rovere, as Pope Julius II, broke ground on the Belvedere in 1504. Even if some these “collections” consisted of only a few inscriptions, Magister has shown us the extraordinary extent of the craze for antiquities in fifteenth-century Rome. She has now turned her attention to one of the most important of these collections… Full Review

See "Susan Dackerman's review":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/659 of this catalogue. In this beautifully produced catalogue, the primary theme of gesture and expressiveness in Rembrandt’s storytelling is set forth in the introduction by Clifford Ackley. A secondary theme is the reception of the artist’s work, examined by Ronni Baer with respect to the historical appreciation of the oil sketches and Thomas Rassieur regarding the making of prints. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. Those fortunate to attend the exhibition will have the stupendous experience of viewing a… Full Review

Far too often works of art produced in the Roman provinces have been studied solely in relation to their supposed metropolitan models, with the notion that provincial art was imitation. This approach has led to a devaluation of the works: since they are regarded as derivative, they have not been examined as products of a specific place and time. Consequently, provincial art’s real role as innovative examples of the negotiation of competing concerns by provincial artists has been ignored. Because the textual sources used for understanding the provinces, especially for the Western part of the Roman Empire, are largely metropolitan… Full Review