Recently Published Reviews

The allure of some of the most inspiring digital projects resides in their ability to recreate sites that are now lost to us, by reconstructing, for example, the now dismantled buildings and urban spaces of ancient Rome or the halls of Egyptian temples. Other projects are admired for the opposite capacity to invoke impossible worlds that never existed, bringing dispersed or even lost works of art together in virtual exhibitions, or positing material relationships that can only be imagined through the portal of a screen. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Going Global in Mughal India occupies the latter realm, using new technologies to… Full Review

Visitors to the exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were funneled through a darkened passageway bordered by two fictive windows through which one glimpsed large archival photographs of two of Paul Durand-Ruel’s major galleries. On the left was his Paris establishment from 1869 until 1882 at 16 rue Laffitte, while on the right was his first New York branch on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1887, and a testament to the dealer’s ambitious foray into the international market. Once past this threshold, museumgoers were greeted by an 1866 portrait of a… Full Review

Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 is Suzanne Preston Blier’s most recent book, and represents a culmination of a research arc spanning from her days as a graduate student until the present. Drawing deeply from the existing archive of material published on the city of Ile-Ife (Ife) as well as her own interviews conducted over the first decade of the twenty-first century, Blier amasses a compendium on the city of Ife and the objects produced by its inhabitants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The volume’s bibliography is perhaps the most comprehensive ever… Full Review

Christa Clarke’s African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance represents the latest scholarship on objects from the Barnes collection. As the title suggests, Clarke is concerned with recounting the history of Albert C. Barnes’s little-discussed yet incredibly significant collecting of artworks from Africa, as well as the relevance of these objects to the larger institution. Barnes amassed a sizeable and important collection of art at the beginning of the twentieth century and established the eponymous Barnes Foundation with the goal of using his collection as a pedagogical tool for students of the… Full Review

In urban studies, the broader social sciences, and science and technology studies, the human dimensions of water have been at the forefront of a move to break down the divide between nature and society. In particular, the interdisciplinary subfield of urban political ecology has emerged as an influential wave of scholarship seeking to incorporate the social production of nature into theorizations of geographical political economy, with many of its most important studies focusing on the provision of, and access to, water (Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003; Maria Kaika… Full Review

In 1922, André Lhote claimed that Georges Seurat was “one of the lighthouses” then guiding a postwar generation of artists. Such an assertion might be understood simply as an assessment of Seurat’s enduring significance; but in her important new account of the artist, Michelle Foa steers a different approach to Lhote’s metaphor. Lighthouses are, in fact, thematically persistent for Seurat, and Foa bookends her analysis with two examples: the 1886 Hospice and Lighthouse of Honfleur and the 1889 Eiffel Tower (the latter to be understood, rightly, as a kind of urban lighthouse). Pointing to the key fact that lighthouses such… Full Review

During much of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, a series of fourteen chapels marking the Vía Crucis, or Stations of the Cross, stretched from the Franciscan monastery in downtown Mexico City to the Calvary chapel at the western edge of the city’s Alameda park. The buildings were constructed between 1684 and 1706, with the support of members of the Third Order of Saint Francis. The chapels allowed residents of Mexico City, who were geographically removed from the Holy Lands by thousands of miles, to retrace the steps of Christ’s passion. Although the chapels—and the ritual practice… Full Review

Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has long been interested in socio-political issues stemming from territory and displacement within marginalized communities, as witnessed through the vestiges of immigration, natural disasters, and warfare. Thus, it is no surprise that these themes feature prominently in three projects in his major solo exhibition, A Story of Negotiation, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and beautifully displayed at the Museo Tamayo. Installed in three generously sized white-cube spaces, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008), Tornado (2000–2010), and Reel-Unreel (2011) consist of a symbiotic relationship between the artist’s chosen mediums of… Full Review

For years now, Mary Roberts has been generating scholarship on the complexities of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Her work emphasizes the interplay between painters, patrons, models, and viewers and, more generally, relations between Western and local actors of this complex world of art production and consumption. Her Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture provides a most welcome continuity with her previous work, as it aims at bringing a dialogic dimension to artistic interaction between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, a matter commonly treated from the perspective of a dominantly, if not exclusively, Western focus. Her book is a fresh, innovative… Full Review

The Renaissance individual, by now, is deconstructed, multiplied, shattered, and divided, but again and again it stubbornly returns, resilient and enduring, reintegrated and unified. In a learned synthesis of cultural and intellectual history, Douglas Biow presents a staunch defense of the concept of the individual, boldly asserting its importance in sixteenth-century Italy. Jacob Burckhardt and Stephen Greenblatt here loom large, as does the recent, insightful work of John Martin (John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Biow assures readers, however, that he intends “not to resuscitate in any form or manner a Burckhardtian view… Full Review

The near total destruction of the sixteenth-century murals in the palatial home of Tomás de la Plaza—an influential cleric in New Spain, dean of the cathedral of Puebla, and patron of the arts—makes for a compelling opening story in Penny Morrill’s new monograph, The Casa del Deán: New World Imagery in a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Mural Cycle. Although much of the original structure and murals were destroyed over the centuries, Morrill re-creates and evaluates key elements of the dean’s residence, and focuses the greater part of her study on two surviving salons distinguished by colorful and symbolically rich murals that… Full Review

Rowland Abiodun’s Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art demonstrates how certain Yoruba art forms fit into a larger cultural and linguistic context. Specifically, it examines the fundamentality of oríkì—a word that encompasses a variety of Yoruba literary, verbal, and performance genres including recitations, incantations, chants, curses, laments, dramatic satire, and poetry. According to Abiodun, an examination of oríkì can provide often overlooked information about the origin or “essential nature” of a work, identify the artist of a piece, indicate the structural underpinnings of Yoruba society, and provide underlying religious or proverbial insights into the artworks… Full Review

Organized around twenty-three chapters, each of which takes its name from the title of an artwork included in that section, America Is Hard to See, the inaugural exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, jettisoned a purely chronological or conventional art-movement “ism” organizational structure in favor of a thematic one. The result challenged traditional (one might say, outmoded) categories of art history and created unexpected juxtapositions that pushed viewers to understand that history—and the history of the United States—in fresh ways. The exhibition does move in linear fashion from the eighth floor to the fifth; but… Full Review

Nestled in a small gallery in the Ahmanson Building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and timed to coincide with the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971 offers viewers new insights into one of the institution’s most legendary curatorial endeavors. Organized by Associate Curator Jennifer King, From the Archives draws from various institutional holdings in order to reflect on how, by linking the visual arts to an expansive nexus of economic and political concern (the aerospace companies, movie studios, and industrial conglomerates that powered the greater Los Angeles region during the… Full Review

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, curated by Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, opens with an empty limestone base from Corinth featuring cuttings for the feet of a bronze figure and inscribed “Lysippos made [this].” In his Natural History (34.37), Pliny credits Lysippos with creating 1,500 bronze statues, none of which have survived. The base serves as a stark reminder of how few large-scale bronze sculptures remain today while also presaging themes explored in this remarkable exhibition. The Hellenistic period stretched from the late fourth-century BCE reign of Alexander the Great until the rise of… Full Review