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

Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Dennis Geronimus, eds.
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2015. 248 pp.; 200 color ills. Paper $40.00 (9781848221734)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, February 1–May 3, 2015; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, June 25–September 27, 2015
Of all the characters passed down from Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, it is Piero di Cosimo perhaps more than any other who came to embody the belief widely held in the Renaissance that art imitates life. What is known of his biography is remarkably sparse, apart from the stories Vasari gleaned as a young apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, once a pupil of the eccentric master. Born in 1462, Piero was actually the son of Lorenzo d’Antonio, not a goldsmith (as Vasari would have it) but a succhiellinaio, or blacksmith. Throughout his career, Piero held an… Full Review
May 5, 2016
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Eugenie Tsai, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2015. 192 pp.; 122 color ills. Cloth $49.95 (9783791354309)
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum, New York, February 20–May 24, 2015
Kehinde Wiley’s lavish paintings demand a lushly illustrated and deeply contemplated exhibition catalogue, which is what Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic provides. It frames the artist’s oeuvre, beginning with his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, and spans his recent developments and the increasingly global scope of his art. The volume joins a considerable body of illustrated book-length attention to the artist, and avoids the more conventional exhibition catalogue format of themed chapters or single-author commentary. Instead it includes two introductory essays followed by succinct interpretations by thirty-five invited commentators. This approach allows multiple voices to frame… Full Review
April 28, 2016
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Connie Butler
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum in association with Prestel, 2015. 208 pp.; 36 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9783791354293)
Exhibition schedule: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 21–September 20, 2015
Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition, Scorched Earth, curated by Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, included twelve paintings, a mural, and a sound installation. Scorched Earth was tough and admirably far-reaching. Exquisitely detailed, the paintings evoked pain and violence. They looked inward and back, and they were surprisingly aqueous. Three haunting, untitled, twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot, black-and-white, unstretched canvases in a low-lit section of a gallery at the Hammer suggested dusky rivers and abrupt stops where Bradford accumulated, stained, and resisted staining by laying on and pulling away wet paper. One of Bradford’s signature text paintings seemed like a… Full Review
April 28, 2016
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Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall
Exh. cat. New York and Washington, DC: Museum of Modern Art and Phillips Collection, 2015. 192 pp. Cloth $50.00 (9780870709647)
Exhibition schedule: One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North, Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 3–September 7, 2015; People on the Move: Beauty and Struggle in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, September 10, 2016–January 17, 2017
Jacob Lawrence figures prominently in the small cohort of African American modernists to achieve renown in their lifetimes. In his case, that recognition came early, bound up with the reception of The Migration of the Negro, his narrative painting cycle of 1941 that is now known as the Migration Series. Over a couple of years, he earned a fellowship to develop it, researched and painted its sixty tempera panels, and published twenty-six in Fortune Magazine. In 1942, he sold the cycle to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which acquired the even-numbered paintings, and the Phillips Memorial… Full Review
April 28, 2016
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Eddie Chambers
Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections, caa.reviews. College Art Association.
Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews Today marks a historic moment for caa.reviews, because with our fourth installment of “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections” the journal is acknowledging its commitment to reviewing scholarly books about African, African American, and African Diaspora art. No one is more responsible for this focus than field editor Eddie Chambers, who since July 2014 has tirelessly shepherded more than twenty reviews from commission to publication, with many more on the way. In explaining how he understands the mission, he writes: “I see my work as a field editor as having the potential to enhance… Full Review
April 21, 2016
Philippe Parreno
Park Avenue Armory, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: June 11–August 2, 2015
Philippe Parreno’s exhibition H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS at the Park Avenue Armory offered New Yorkers a comprehensive view of a practice that has, since the 1980s, used cinematic and scenographic devices to merge art and reality. Building on his recent retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the installation construed the cavernous Armory space as a “street” lined with twenty-six of Parreno’s characteristic lightbulb marquees, and culminated in a set of bleachers that rotated to face three suspended screens. Onto these were projected four films made since 2000: Anywhere Out of the World (2000); June 8, 1968 (2009)… Full Review
April 21, 2016
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David Kertai
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 368 pp.; 24 color ills.; 73 b/w ills. Cloth $140.00 (9780198723189)
Rulers of the Late Assyrian Empire (also known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, ca. 900–612 BCE) constructed monumental royal palaces as part of large state-sponsored building programs at Assur, Kalḫu (Nimrud), Dur-Sharruken (Khorsabad), and Nineveh, the royal centers of the Assyrian heartland in present-day northern Iraq. These structures served as the principal residences of the royal family, as well as the administrative and ceremonial centers of state. Previous studies of this building type have focused largely on the role of their decoration in Assyrian visual culture, exploring questions of narrative, iconography, identity, and royal propaganda with respect to the carved stone… Full Review
April 21, 2016
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Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, ed.
Exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015. 272 pp.; 185 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $60.00 (9780300210866)
Exhibition schedule: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, February 15–May 10, 2015; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 14–September 13, 2015; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 18, 2015–January 17, 2016
The exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) is the result of collaboration among the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the KHM in Vienna. The show contained nearly one hundred paintings and artifacts that illustrated the development of courtly patronage and representation over the course of more than half a millennium. Curated by Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, the exhibition took a broad multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the history of the imperial family and the range of visual and figural media used… Full Review
April 21, 2016
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Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, eds.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015. 352 pp.; 230 color ills.; 115 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9781935963080)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 11–August 29, 2015; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, October 11, 2015–January 17, 2016; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, February 18, 2016–May 15, 2016
International Pop recounts the emergence of Pop art from the 1950s through the early 1970s and takes a global approach to a phenomenon, which in its various iterations, responded critically and imaginatively to radical cultural and political currents. By including art across media and produced by artists associated with movements that originated in Europe, Asia, and North and South America, the show aims to broaden the scope of what previous exhibitions and prevailing scholarship have conceived of as “Pop.” These comparisons and confrontations reveal the myriad ways in which international artists deployed strategies and aesthetic modalities that alternately coincided with… Full Review
April 14, 2016
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Valerie Hillings and Daniel Birnbaum
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2014. 256 pp. Cloth $40.00 (9780892075140)
Exhibition schedule: Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 10, 2014–January 7, 2015
ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, curated by Valerie Hillings, provides the first opportunity in over fifty years for an American audience to take in the diverse array of experimental artistic practices developed across the international ZERO network. While Zero may initially bring to mind the German triumvirate of Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, Hillings situates their experiments in an expansive community of peers and makes visible their sources of inspiration. Exhibition history provides the logic both for assembling this particular grouping of artists and for several of Hillings’s installation strategies, which seek to recreate the original experience… Full Review
April 14, 2016
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Mary Ann Eaverly
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 192 pp.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780472119110)
Mary Ann Eaverly’s Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach addresses the skin color differentiation of men and women in ancient Egyptian and Greek art. Eaverly criticizes the marginalization of this topic in current scholarly discussion and contends that, in instances where the topic has been explored, interpretations are generally outdated. According to Eaverly, the consensus that male/female skin color differentiation occurs because it realistically indicates sun exposure—men are habitually outside in the sun, whereas women remain indoors—is an inadequate conclusion that continues to be recycled in scholarship today. In the book, she… Full Review
April 14, 2016
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Eric Jan Sluijter
Oculi: Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, 14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. 496 pp.; 329 color ills.; 297 b/w ills. Cloth $210.00 (9789027249661)
La peinture d’histoire occupe une place singulière dans l’histoire de l’art hollandais du XVIIe siècle. Cette peinture universelle qui, contrairement aux genres, s’adressent aux talents particuliers, suppose la maîtrise de toutes les parties de la peinture, est considérée théoriquement comme «le degré le plus haut et le plus important de l’art de peinture» (Samuel van Hoogstraten). De la peinture, elle est considérée en effet comme la partie la plus difficile, qui exige d’idéaliser la nature visible d’après l’antique, les grands maîtres et les grandes fables poétiques et historiques et de représenter la figure humaine, ses mouvements comme ses passions. … Full Review
April 7, 2016
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Kristin Ross
London: Verso, 2015. 156 pp. Cloth $23.95 (9781781688397)
Textbooks of nineteenth-century European art rarely mention the 1871 Paris Commune since it produced few memorable artworks, save for André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri’s photographs of dead bodies in coffins. The Commune is typically described as a workers’ insurrection that emerged after the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War left the city in ruins and absent of political authority as a result of the conservative government helmed by Adolphe Thiers having moved its headquarters to Versailles, along with most of the city’s wealthy population. Those left behind in the predominantly working-class neighborhoods established their own government on March 18, 1871. Disdéri’s images… Full Review
April 7, 2016
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Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi
Exh. cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with 5 Continents Editions, 2014. 287 pp.; 281 ills. Cloth $60.00 (9788874396665)
Exhibition schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, February 22–May 31, 2015; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, June 28–September 27, 2015; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, November 28, 2015–March 6, 2016
Containing nearly 160 artworks, the exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa explores what it means to be “Senufo,” a term describing some of the peoples, languages, and cultures in northern Côte d’Ivoire, southern Mali, and Burkina Faso. It also questions the canonical assumptions applied by many academics and culture brokers to the definition and underlying parameters of Senufo art, culture, and identity. In challenging the long-disputed but tenaciously enduring belief in the “one tribe, one style” model of conceptualizing traditional African art, this exhibition and catalogue embody a more expansive view of Senufo culture that can stand as… Full Review
April 7, 2016
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Gregory Jecmen and Freyda Spira
Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2012. 120 pp.; 48 color ills. Cloth $36.00 (9781848221222)
Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, September 30–December 31, 2012; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, October 5, 2013–January 5, 2014; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, September 19–December 14, 2014
The Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475–1540 catalogue accompanied the first exhibition staged outside Germany focusing entirely on Renaissance art in Augsburg. It is a handsome, small-format hardcover, beautifully designed and illustrated with superb color reproductions. It contains three essays and a checklist of the 102 objects exhibited—of which, regrettably, fewer than half are illustrated. The vast majority of these are prints, complemented by a few drawings and medals, slightly compromising the title of the publication which seems to imply a more balanced selection. The core of the exhibits is drawn from the rich holdings at the National Gallery… Full Review
April 7, 2016
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