Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Miriam M. Basilio
New York: Routledge, 2013. 340 pp.; 20 color ills.; 51 b/w ills. Cloth $130.05 (9781409464815)
Miriam M. Basilio’s excellent monograph, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War, provides an in-depth study of images that were in visual circulation both during and immediately after the conflict that tore Spain apart. That Basilio concludes her work with a broad look at how different artists have engaged with historical memory through the interrogation of museums, archives, and testimony shows how the Spanish Civil War continues to influence the collective imaginary and underlines the timeliness of an exhaustive study such as hers. The argument at the core of the book is that the visual-propaganda campaigns and… Full Review
December 29, 2016
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Christina M. Anderson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 256 pp.; 40 color ills.; 15 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300209686)
Art historians have long known Daniel Nijs (or Nys) as the merchant who arranged the sale of a large part of the collection of the dukes of Mantua to Charles I of England in the single “greatest art deal of the seventeenth century” (1). Although documents relating to the transaction were published long ago by Noel Sainsbury and Alessandro Luzio, Nijs himself has remained a fairly obscure figure. Based on a fresh examination of manuscript sources, Christina M. Anderson’s The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection is the first to examine his… Full Review
December 28, 2016
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Alexa Sand
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 423 pp.; 7 color ills.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $125.00 (9781107032224)
Alexa Sand’s study of owner portraits in Francophone women’s devotional manuscripts, primarily from 1200 to 1350, presents a theoretically aware discussion of essential themes associated with illuminated Books of Hours: individual and family, public and private, space and time. Visual cues for devotion, defined as “striving for transformation through vision” (81), inspire Sand’s analysis of the spaces activated while performing prayer with self-reflexive images and texts. These devotional scenes in manuscripts for women and, in selected case studies, men typically feature kneeling supplicants. Pictured with a manuscript and prayer stand before a spiritually charged image, the figures are posed in… Full Review
December 28, 2016
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Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, eds.
Exh. cat. Saratoga Springs, NY: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in association with DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2014. 254 pp. Cloth $49.95 (9783791352336)
Exhibition schedule: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY, January 19–July 29, 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, June 6–September 14, 2014; Baker Museum, Naples, FL, September 27, 2014–January 4, 2015; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, January 31–April 18, 2015; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, June 14–November 11, 2015
Corita Kent is having a moment. Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, the 2013 exhibition organized by Skidmore College’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, was followed in 2015 by Corita Kent and the Language of Pop at Harvard Art Museums; Sister Corita’s Summer of Love at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand; and love is here to stay (and that’s enough): Prints by Sister Corita Kent at the University of San Diego’s Robert and Karen Hoehn Family Galleries in 2016. Her work was also featured in major group exhibitions such as… Full Review
December 22, 2016
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Elina Gertsman
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015. 288 pp.; 48 color ills.; 106 b/w ills. Cloth $79.95 (9780271064017)
In Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, a group of about forty sculptures known as Shrine Madonnas are the device for Elina Gertsman’s ambitious exploration of late medieval devotion. Also known as Vierges ouvrantes, most Shrine Madonnas are carved from wood and dated to between 1270 and 1500. Some are small enough to fit in a person’s hands, while others are almost life size. All depict the Virgin Mary seated on a throne and holding the Christ child. The exterior opens up to reveal an interior cavity, which usually houses a sculpted Trinity and is decorated with… Full Review
December 21, 2016
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Juliet B. Wiersema
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 224 pp.; 185 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780292761254)
Juliet B. Wiersema’s Architectural Vessels of the Moche: Ceramic Diagrams of Sacred Space in Ancient Peru is a significant contribution to the field of art history for two reasons. The first is the subject matter: she addresses the relationship between architecture and its representation through an examination and comparison of ceramic vessels that represent architectural spaces and archaeologically recovered architectural remains from the Moche culture of the Peruvian north coast (ca. 100–900 CE), a topic that has not been closely researched prior to this volume. The second is how she confronts the complications that come from studying objects without provenience… Full Review
December 21, 2016
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Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Hauser Wirth and Schimmel in association with Skira Rizzoli, 2016. 256 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $55.00 (9788857231303)
Exhibition schedule: Hauser Wirth and Schimmel, Los Angeles, March 13–September 4, 2016
Co-curated by Paul Schimmel, former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and partner and vice president at Hauser and Wirth; and Jenni Sorkin, art historian, critic, and assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016 felt like an ambitious museum exhibition, especially with its impressive roster of thirty-four artists working across so much of the twentieth century and into the present. And yet it was the inaugural project at Hauser Wirth and Schimmel, a commercial gallery-cum-arts complex. Located in the heart of… Full Review
December 20, 2016
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Brooklyn Museum, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum, New York, May 1–November 8, 2015
A powerful signifier of knowledge and collective memory in Western modernity, the archive has been a topic of much interest in art history and cultural studies. The scholarship of the last few decades—from Michel Foucault’s to Hal Foster’s—has exposed its artifice, indeterminacy, and historical role in the formation and operation of power structures. What is more, despite the fact that the photograph’s claim of veracity has been seriously challenged by the visual culture of the late twentieth century, it has remained a key component of most modern archives. Thus, photography, more as a discursive agent than as a medium, has… Full Review
December 15, 2016
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Helen Molesworth, ed.
Exh. cat. Boston: Institute for Contemporary Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015. 400 pp.; 318 color ills.; 170 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300211917)
Exhibition schedule: Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, October 10, 2015–January 24, 2016; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 21–May 15, 2016; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, September 17, 2016–January 1, 2017
That Anni Albers’s modestly sized weaving Free-Hanging Room Divider (1949) is one of the larger objects in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 is a testament to the spare conditions under which the artists at Black Mountain College worked. An island of progressivism in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Black Mountain was a small school that staged a grand experiment in collectivism and experiential education. Students and faculty lived together; art practice was at the center of a liberal arts curriculum; and all participated in a work program that kept the school afloat. Throughout its short existence, the college… Full Review
December 14, 2016
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Fram Kitagawa
Exh. cat. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015. 304 pp.; 354 color ills.; 2 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9781616894245)
Exhibition schedule: Nīgata, Japan, July 26–September 13, 2015
In 1999, when a former student activist of the 1960s, Fram Kitagawa, proposed an idea for revitalizing the southern areas of Japan’s Nīgata Prefecture with contemporary art, its six municipalities unanimously declined. But Kitagawa insisted that art could help build a community to reinvigorate the desolate agrarian region and reverse the damage done by the government’s ferocious urbanization. After more than two thousand meetings with local communities, the effort crystallized in the first Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2000. The sixth edition was held in 2015. The world’s largest international exhibition, the latest triennale revealed 180 new works in… Full Review
December 14, 2016
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Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Frick Collection and Yale University Press, 2016. 320 pp.; 278 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300212051)
Exhibition schedule: Frick Collection, New York, March 2–June 5, 2016
Assembled from roughly forty different public and private collections, the exhibition Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture, curated by Stijn Alsteens and Adam Eaker, brought together more than one hundred paintings, drawings, and prints by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) and his contemporaries. Perhaps not coincidentally, the exhibition appeared exactly twenty-five years after another landmark Van Dyck show in New York—Christopher Brown’s groundbreaking The Drawings of Anthony van Dyck at the Morgan Library. Though separated by a quarter century, the two are conceptually linked, each taking as its starting point Van Dyck’s prodigious abilities as a draftsman. While the earlier… Full Review
December 9, 2016
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Erik Thunø
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 325 pp.; 25 color ills.; 104 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (9781107069909)
Erik Thunø’s The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome: Time, Network, and Repetition presents an alternative “non-diachronic” art-historical interpretation of Roman apse decoration from the sixth through ninth centuries. He identifies a core set of examples that share key visual and textual features, including: SS. Cosmas and Damian (526–30); S. Agnese (625–38); S. Venanzio (640–42); the apses of Paschal I (817–24)—S. Prassede, S. Cecelia, S. Maria in Domnica; and S. Marco (827–44). While he believes that scholarship to date has produced compelling studies of the individual monuments, Thunø chooses to deliberately ignore, disregard, and overlook (his terms) various disciplinary assumptions… Full Review
December 8, 2016
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Marta Gutman
Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 448 pp.; 12 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780226311289)
The current obsessive fixation on children, childhood, and parenting has relegated the notion of “other people’s children” to a position of indifference and even mild disdain on the part of many middle- and upper-middle-class citizens. Yet the history of philanthropy and the preoccupation with the care of poor children was a central purpose of wealthy and middle-class women for a century and a half. In her book A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950, Marta Gutman explores the long tradition of benevolent concern for the poorest children in the rapidly urbanizing context of… Full Review
December 8, 2016
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Jeffrey Chipps Smith, ed.
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 244 pp.; 59 b/w ills. Cloth $104.95 (9781472435873)
Blind spots help define a period eye. That is, what one period seems to lack is precisely what distinguishes its conventions from those of other periods. Yet the blind spots are unstable. Given that examining textual documentation of a period for its conventional visual terms remains central to art-historical practice, such documents require interpretation and reinterpretation. Even the most self-conscious or straightforward document writers, announcing their own biases, are unaware of all the implications of their sociocultural conditioning. These implications themselves change with the sociocultural responsibilities of future readers. If art historiography charts this shift, wise art historians might as… Full Review
December 7, 2016
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Lowery Stokes Sims, ed.
Exh. cat. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015. 256 pp.; 145 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780878468157)
In 2015, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, produced a large, handsome catalogue featuring approximately one hundred works by African American artists from its permanent collection, all of which were acquired over the past four decades. Three factors had a significant impact in amassing this art. Since 1969, Edmund Barry Gaither, curator and director of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA) in Boston, has also served as a curator and consultant to the MFA. In 2005, the MFA Trustee and Overseer Diversity Advisory Committee established the Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection to strengthen and diversify its world-renowned… Full Review
December 1, 2016
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