Recently Published Reviews

Textbooks are lightning rods for criticism. The purpose of a textbook is to distill the latest scholarship in a wide array of fields for a nonspecialist, usually undergraduate audience. But because it must sacrifice depth for breadth, the textbook is easily criticized by area specialists. Therefore, in an effort to appease as many scholars as possible, it ends up presenting a bricolage of perspectives and thus loses any sense of a single authorial intent. Moreover, no matter how hard the revisionist author might try, the textbook usually remains conservative, muting the impact of new scholarship and, in trying to please… Full Review

Probably everyone acquainted with Japanese art knows the two most famous anecdotes about the creation of painting. In the first, a master vexed by his student’s inability to depict a bamboo enjoins him to “become a bamboo.” No doubt apocryphal, there is nevertheless more than a grain in truth here, and this story constitutes one of the dominant myths of art production all across East Asia. This strain of thought is associated with the nanga (literati) movement, which held that there was little of value to be gleaned in the studio. Rather, aspirants should look about them and study, or… Full Review

In early February of 1891, shortly before the grand opening of his lavish Tampa Bay Hotel, Henry Plant received an affable, jokingly naïve telegram from Henry Flagler, the well-known railroad magnate who already owned three successful resort hotels in St. Augustine. “Friend Plant,” the wire read, “where is this place I’ve heard about called Tampa?” In turn, Plant sent a brief but confident reply: “Friend Flagler, just follow the crowds.” In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, American tourists were only beginning to discover Florida, and it was Flagler and Plant who shaped, to a… Full Review

Diane Wolfthal’s Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives is a difficult and necessary book to read; indeed, this should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the visual cultures of Western traditions. The author examines a vast body of work through a feminist lens to explore the realities of rape for women—as well as for men—in late medieval and early modern Europe. Informed by her own feminist convictions and a comprehensive knowledge of the material, Wolfthal aims “to recapture the muted or silenced voices of the rape victims, to see the violation from their point of… Full Review

In St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology, Jeffrey Hamburger investigates the complex relationships forged in the later Middle Ages among art, mysticism, and visionary experience. In so doing, he continues the stimulating work he began in earlier, groundbreaking studies such as The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland ca. 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998). The specific task Hamburger sets for himself in this newest effort is to… Full Review

Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art contributes to the growing body of interdisciplinary research on women’s power in early modern Europe (or gender and power, more broadly), in practice and in imagery. Written to accompany an exhibition organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the book features an introduction and four topical essays by a cadre of scholars who represent different disciplinary approaches. Groups of images, accompanied by captions and brief comments, follow each essay. Appropriately acknowledging the gender ideologies affecting women and their representation in various cultural forms during this period, Women… Full Review

Feminist art history is now a well-established subfield of Western art history, but until quite recently those studying gender in pre-Columbian art had to rely on a slim bibliography. Today, several contributions focusing on the pre-Columbian and early colonial world have appeared, including one on women throughout the ancient Americas (Karen Bruhns and Karen Stothert, Women in Ancient America [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999]), another on gender in Mesoamerica (Rosemary Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000]), and two volumes on Maya women (Traci Ardren, ed., Ancient Maya Women [Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira… Full Review

Yet another Count. After Balthus (Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola by his own naming), we read that Wolfgang Paalen called himself “Count von Paalen” before selling his title in an impoverished moment in Paris. According to Amy Winter, Paalen—Count or not—authored the supposed monograph about himself in 1946, said to be by one Gustav Regler. That is already an obfuscation. Here is the story. In his autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, Regler enthuses in no uncertain terms about the artist: I went to his studio to look at his pictures. There was something of Moby Dick in the lofty … Full Review

For many American art historians, Spain’s fifteenth century is a murky period better known for its religious oppression and explosive colonialism than for its manuscripts. With Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, Lynette M. F. Bosch introduces Anglophone readers to the era through an assiduously detailed study of two-dozen illuminated liturgical manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Toledo. Until now, these lavishly decorated books, commissioned between 1446 and 1495 by the prominent Toledan prelates Archbishop Alfonso Carillo y Acuña and Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, have been only scantily published and were available almost… Full Review

“Unless our reading takes us far away from the pictures, it will not lead us properly back to them.” So Edgar Wind (1900–1971) reflected in an early and abandoned draft of his introduction to Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Wind aptly encapsulated his method, which, it is sometimes forgotten, derived much of its Olympian energy and original character from deep attention to the language of form. “Iconography,” he continued in his draft, “is nothing if not what Focillon regretfully called un détour. The divergences should be pursued, the convergences distrusted… Full Review

Xu Bing is arguably the contemporary Chinese artist best known to audiences outside of China. Winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the subject of several one-person shows at small museums around the country, he has received worldwide recognition and has been the subject of several critical essays. Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing brought together several periods of the artist’s work for the first time in a major American museum exhibition. Like many Chinese artists living and working in a postmodern, global art world, Xu has had to engage with the question of shifting and multiple audiences for… Full Review

This book is the product of two interconnected developments. First, contemporary Mexican artists moving in the international art world are enjoying a lot of success, and while Mexican art is now no longer represented solely by the muralists, figures such as Santiago Sierra, Carlos Amorales, Minerva Cuevas, and Gabriel Kuri are reinventing the avant-garde of social intervention. This development has been paralleled in art history in Mexico by the emergence of a socially engaged, contextualizing approach. Some of this new work has been “social art history” based on thorough research of primary sources, but central to it all… Full Review

Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe hold an exceptional status as two of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century American art. Notwithstanding the shared distinction of their canonical positions, their art could not be more different. While Hopper produced striking iconic images of the American scene, O’Keeffe’s paintings are associated with the modernist, abstracted aesthetics of the first American avant-garde. In their own day, the artists themselves moved in distinct professional circles that did not overlap. Yet when viewed comparatively, Hopper and O’Keeffe’s images exhibit some surprising thematic commonalities, particularly concerning issues of gender and embodiment, intimacy… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Since this reviewer was unable to visit either venue, the following comments, perforce, concentrate on the only permanent record of the show, its catalogue. The catalogue is divided into two distinct parts: six essays with separate authors that treat different aspects of the exhibition’s content, and a series of eighty-five catalogue entries. The latter are not distinguished by author, but rather were the result of a “collaborative effort, reflecting the input of all those listed on the… Full Review

To write a book entitled The Arts of India must have been a labor even more daunting than to write a review of one. The Western reader might reflect on what it would be like to address “the Arts of Europe” between two covers. Admittedly this volume catalogues one museum’s collection, which might seem to require finite skills. In fact, that collection includes forms often entrusted to separate curatorial departments: stone sculpture (originally part of a building), bronze sculpture (created and set differently), paintings (originally viewed by readers and connoisseurs of diverse kinds), textiles (in a wide range of techniques,… Full Review