Recently Published Reviews

After describing Luca della Robbia’s achievements in marble and bronze, Giorgio Vasari goes on to note how much time he spent in making them, [and upon recognizing] that he had gained very little and that the labour had been very great, he resolved to abandon marble and bronze and to see whether he could gather better fruits from another method. Wherefore, reflecting that clay could be worked easily and with little labour, and that it was only necessary to find a method whereby works made with it might be preserved for a long time . . . after having made… Full Review

Kathleen Giles Arthur’s concise study illuminates the intersection of visual culture and the spiritual lives of Observant Franciscan women in fifteenth-century Ferrara, Italy. Her book is an outstanding and much-needed contribution to scholarship on art and the Poor Clares. Historians of this topic have focused primarily on the visionary treatise Le sette armi spirituali, written by Caterina Vigri (1413–1463), founder of the convent now usually known as Corpus Domini in Bologna. Caterina spent much of her life in Ferrara, first at the d’Este court of Niccolò III, where she served as lady-in-waiting to his wife Parisina. In 1426… Full Review

In Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism, Sam Rose contends with the discursive legacy of “formalist modernism,” a narrative contaminated by perpetuating misunderstandings. According to Rose, “formalist modernism” constitutes a narrow view that cleaves internal form from external meaning, separating art from life. Formalism itself, as an intellectual category, has suffered the same reductivist fate that it purports to drive in the orthodox trajectory of modern art, from representation to abstraction. To counter this narrative, Rose situates Roger Fry’s writings on form in an expansive intellectual nexus that includes connoisseurship, literary criticism, design theory, Marxist art… Full Review

The history of photography has long been written along geographic boundaries. Until recently nation-based narratives, especially those of Great Britain, France, and the United States, dominated the field, and when new studies representing long-neglected corners of the world appeared, they tended to replicate the well-established examples that preceded them. Within the past decade, however, scholars have begun to shift emphasis from individual photographers and nations to the circulation of images and transnational exchange, presenting local practices within a much wider context of global contact and dissemination. The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China is… Full Review

This book offers readers an in-depth study of one single object: the world map (mappa mundi) produced for Hereford Cathedral in England around 1300 CE. Rather than situating this work within the history of cartography, Marcia Kupfer treats it as an object of art. She convincingly argues that by exclusively considering the map as a repository of geographical knowledge, scholars have fundamentally misunderstood the mappa mundi and some of its puzzling visual characteristics. Tellingly, the interchange of the legends of Africa and Europe on the map has traditionally been interpreted as a failure on the part of a… Full Review

Art is autobiography in the nostalgic mode. This is the main lesson of Marisa Anne Bass’s Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt. This learned and refined book examines the life and works of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1601), the troubled Netherlandish artist who was forced to leave the Low Countries in the wake of the Dutch Revolt and spent his later years at the Bavarian court of Duke Albrecht V and then in Rudolf II’s Prague. In Bass’s telling, the determining event of Hoefnagel’s life was the revolt. Experiences of war and loss permeate his art and thinking, especially… Full Review

In Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism, Sam Rose revisits British writing on art over the first four decades of the twentieth century so as to determine what can be retrieved from its formalisms. Rose asks in what way art historical formalisms can be made productive for today’s renewed interest in aesthetics and in light of an urgent, more inclusive turn in the discipline from Western modernism to global modernisms. The answer, in a nutshell, is a “more modest” formalism (10). Throughout the book, the counterpart to this modest formalism is a capacious “pure” formalism that… Full Review

This beautifully produced and illustrated book joins a growing shelf of studies devoted in whole or in substantial part to phenomena of scale in world arts and visual and material cultures, including David Summers’s Real Spaces (Phaidon, 2003), a special issue of the journal Art History (38, no. 2; April 2015) edited by Joan Kee and Emanuele Lugli, Lugli’s own recent book The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal (Periscope, 2012), and Elizabeth A. Honig’s Jan Brueghel… Full Review

The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico is the second oldest museum in the state, as reflected by its architecture. The entrance feels ecclesiastical, as you wind your way along the adobe walls and open the massive wooden blue doors, then you suddenly find yourself in a crowded gift shop, followed by a narrow corridor gallery. In 2019, Judy Chicago’s serigraphs lined those walls, with highly stylized images of a woman/earth mother giving birth to the cosmos. She is shown frontally, her legs splayed, her vagina stretched into an open wound with radiating lines flowing out… Full Review

The press release for the US Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale described Robert Colescott (1925–2009) as “arguably the most important American figurative painter of his generation.” The qualifier, “arguably,” is significant, because since the 1990s few scholars have been making that argument. A lifelong teacher, Colescott didn’t begin to make a name for himself until 1971, at the age of forty-six, with outrageous, satirical paintings about race, sexuality, and power in art history and in American culture generally. By the 1980s, Colescott had become a subject of frequent controversy for his art historical parodies, which took aim at the… Full Review

In Surrealism at Play, Susan Laxton weaves an alternate history of Surrealism through the concept of play, a historically underacknowledged (yet, in her telling, constitutive) element of the movement. This is serious play: play as process not product, as action and experience. Play undergirds the Surrealists’ ambition not only to remake the art of making art but also to reform intersubjective relations and modern experience; it is a critical force available precisely because it is “not work, not serious, not part of normal life, unreal, inauthentic” (12). Laxton’s crucial interlocutor is Walter Benjamin. Indeed, one could understand her project… Full Review

A curious pocket-size manuscript made in colonial Mexico, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has long eluded synthetic assessment, for good reason: its diminutive size belies the complex, hybrid contents—over one hundred pages thick with information in various forms by different hands, previously dismissed as apparently miscellaneous. Recorded primarily in an Aztec pictorial system of writing around 1580, its seemingly incongruent sections engage a range of subjects drawn from both native and European traditions. In this superb monograph by Lori Boornazian Diel, the Codex Mexicanus has finally found its integration. In fact, this study does much… Full Review

Following up on her 2004 book on Paul Klee and the decorative in modern art (Cambridge University Press), Jenny Anger’s latest volume recounts the history of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (1910–32), a Berlin-based cultural venture bringing together art, performance, theater, periodical publishing, teaching, and bookselling, thus continuing her exploration of an expansive notion of modernism that works against essentializing conceptions of the different arts. Simultaneously, the volume looks across the Atlantic to tell the story of the Société Anonyme (1920–50), an undertaking by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray that was modeled on Der Sturm. One of the book’s… Full Review

This splendidly illustrated exhibition catalog is devoted to one particularly prominent Attic vase painter, the so-named Berlin Painter. Whereas an exhibition on one artist may still count as a logical choice by curators of an art museum, such a focus on the oeuvre of one individual has become highly unusual within scholarly approaches to Greek art and visual culture over recent decades. The catalog addresses both an art-museum public and scholars of Greek art and archaeology. Nevertheless, a large part of this book responds more specifically to the interests of vase painting research in Sir John Beazley’s connoisseurial tradition—a tradition… Full Review

As suggested by the title of her erudite and intellectually ambitious new book, Malika Maskarinec argues that form is a dynamic concept in modern German philosophical aesthetics. Using the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of Formkraft as a critical lens, Maskarinec reads not only the aesthetic theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Simmel, Theodor Lipps, and Paul Klee but also the experimental writings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin, in terms of a dynamic whereby form-as-force defies (but also in large part depends on) gravity. Despite some terminological slippage (gravity is frequently equated with the weight of matter; form is now… Full Review