Recently Published Reviews

The Sainte-Chapelle de Paris is renowned as a monumental reliquary, designed for King Louis IX (r. 1214–70, canonized 1297), to guard the Crown of Thorns and other Passion relics. Its fame is matched only by praise (then and now) for its dazzling Gothic beauty. Despite its importance, few historians have attempted to understand its design. Meredith Cohen’s book fills this void by offering new insight into its architectural significance. The text is organized into five chapters that analyze the creation, dissemination, and crystallization of an aesthetic associated with Capetian rulership in Paris. She retraces the royal patronage of architecture from… Full Review

Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World of Greece and Rome was the first in a series of exhibitions organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum that put the art and history of ancient Greece and Rome in context by elucidating their relationships with neighboring civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. This approach of viewing pre-modern civilizations as part of a global network, in this case interconnected via trade, diplomacy, warfare, and religion, is part of a larger and welcome trend in museum exhibitions worldwide. The Mediterranean Sea has always functioned as both boundary and link between the… Full Review

Rencontres à Venise was visually sumptuous and intellectually stimulating while manageable in size, graced by the superb quality of the loans and accompanied by an excellent catalogue, coedited by the curators Stefania Mason and Linda Borean, two distinguished Italian scholars of Venetian art. Whereas Mason’s catalogue essay provides a fresh analysis of the renewal of Venetian painting in the seventeenth century, weaving together its many threads, Borean’s contribution traces the changes in artistic practices and patterns of patronage and collecting that nourished that renewal. Andrea Bacchi, who directed the sculpture section, presents a useful overview of the medium in the… Full Review

Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open is based on the five lectures, collectively titled “Sculpture on the Threshold—An Enquiry into the Underlying Forms of Sculpture,” that Penelope Curtis delivered as the 2015 Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in London. The framework of the lecture series, given biennially since 1994 by selected leading scholars of British art, accounts for the specific national focus of the book, though at times it seems incongruous for a project concerned with identifying something akin to a universal vocabulary of sculpture. Curtis justifies this exact issue in the preface, writing that beyond the… Full Review

As the migration of people across national borders becomes an increasingly contentious issue, Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 offers a history of the impact of one specific geographic migration of people and ideas back and forth across the Mexico-California border. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition that took place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from September 17, 2017, to April 1, 2018. The exhibition and catalogue were created to explore and complicate the history of design and architectural influence across the border and show the ways in which design and architecture in Mexico and… Full Review

From the Page to the Street: Latin American Conceptualism, curated by Julia Detchon, the 2017–2018 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum, draws from its collection of prints and drawings to reconsider the role of paper in translating the concerns of artists into political protest in Latin America during the 1960s and early 1980s. Whether designed to evade the censorship of regional dictators or to bind the concerns of art to the conditions of daily life, postcards, lithographs, newsprint, and butcher paper, hanging cold and quiet within the museum’s Paper Vault, represent an archive… Full Review

Architectural historians have reason to welcome The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem and An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South. Brian D. Goldstein, an architecture, urban, and planning historian, and Angel David Nieves, an architecture and urban historian with expertise in the digital humanities, tell important stories that enrich our understanding of architecture and planning in relationship to race, racism, gender, and grassroots social movements in the United States. The focus on the built environment in each case study, one of postwar Harlem and the other of the Jim Crow South… Full Review

In November 2017, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened its magnificent buildings and dome, which reflect contemplatively on the conventional white-cube gallery and local architectural traditions. To this reviewer the building is eclipsed by the collection. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has acquired objects from 3000 BCE to 2016 with the accession of Ai Weiwei’s Fountain of Light. In addition, the Agence France-Muséums provides them, as part of a thirty-year agreement, management advice, object loans, and the use of the brand “Louvre” for $1.27 billion. They will host four temporary exhibitions a year from the thirteen partner museums in France. The… Full Review

“I have made something graceful,” Gustave Courbet once said of his Young Ladies of the Village (127). When his painting of three elegantly dressed women charitably offering a piece of bread to a raggedy peasant girl appeared at the Salon of 1852, however, critics saw anything but grace. On the contrary, for Gustave Planche it manifested the artist’s “disdain for anything resembling beauty or formal elegance” (Revue des deux mondes, 670). Today, it is perhaps the work’s placid treatment of light, its constraint, and spatial distancing that strike us in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it now… Full Review

David O’Brien’s book is a timely addition to Delacroix literature at a significant moment when the great Romantic painter is once again in the limelight. A major retrospective exhibition—the first since 1963—of 180 of his works just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only American venue, following the show’s display at the Louvre museum. A more intimate exhibition around Delacroix and the theme of “struggle” as exemplified in his Saint-Sulpice murals—their antecedents and their afterlife in modernist painting—ran parallel with the Louvre retrospective at the Musée National Eugène Delacroix in the painter’s atelier on the picturesque Place Fürstenberg… Full Review

Several years ago, an Egyptian fly who died in 1870 was belatedly elegized in the pages of a prominent cultural studies journal. This poor airborne creature had lost its way, navigating into the camera of Antonio Beato and careening into the sticky collodion that coated the photographer’s glass plate negative. The fly’s treacly end would secure its immortality, for when the image was printed, the carcass loomed monstrously large over the citadel that was Beato’s putative subject. Occupying the flat surface of the plate and of the print, the mummified fly makes a travesty of the perspectival construction of the… Full Review

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the latest exhibition from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explored the influence of Catholicism on fashion. As curator Andrew Bolton writes in the exhibition catalogue, it examined “how the Catholic imagination has shaped the creativity of designers and how it is conveyed through their fashions” (96). The exhibition design, by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, capitalized on light and height to endow each space with its own environment, and a distinctive soundtrack used the emotive power of song to envelop visitors as they entered. Credit is due… Full Review

Peggy McCracken’s new book is about power. Although the burgeoning field of human-animal studies has been dominated by literary historians like herself, McCracken’s approach is refreshingly interdisciplinary and opens the door to new ways in which scholars in other disciplines might enter this increasingly important discourse. In her introduction, McCracken’s thesis is crystal clear: “literary texts use human-animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others” (1). Her sources are wide ranging and include fables, bestiaries, romances, and the Bible. As the title suggests, actual animal skins function on multiple levels by forming (or concealing) identity and… Full Review

Shari Tishman’s Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation is a book that covers the whole field of education, beginning with children in primary school to adults visiting museums. Though I intend to discuss the entire scope of the book here, my primary concern is how its thesis applies to people, of any age, when they look at art in museums. My first thought when asked to review the book was that the concept of “slow looking” is appealing, but is it realistic? Our tendency for multitasking, fast looking, and immediate information saturates our lives today. Can… Full Review

In 2017, the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, United Kingdom) and the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) marked the centenary of Edgar Degas’s death with exhibitions that explored different aspects of the painter’s legacy. Each exhibition drew attention to myths that developed about Degas and his art in the years after his death, highlighting approaches that dealers and collectors took to the marketing and acquisition of his works. The subtitle of the Fitzwilliam exhibition—“a passion for perfection”—is taken from a comment that the celebrated dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard made in the 1924 book he published about Degas. As noted by the curator, Jane… Full Review