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

Sylvain Amic and Ségolène Le Men, eds.
Exh. cat. Rouen and Cologne: Musées de Rouen and Wallraf-Richartz Museum in association with Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2014. 416 pp.; 367 ills. Paper €39.00 (9782757207901)
Exhibition schedule: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, April 12–August 31, 2014; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, September 26, 2014–January 18, 2015
Cathédrales 1789–1914: Un mythe moderne provides a rich overview of the post-Revolutionary European fascination for depicting Gothic architecture in art. Reproducing some 180 works by 60 artists working in different media—including painting, sculpture, photography, furniture, jewelry, and wood carving—this beautifully illustrated catalogue is the fruit of an exhibition presented first at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and then at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud in Cologne. Like many commemorative exhibitions from 2014, this one, too, references the Great War, yet it focuses much more on shared values (mutual fascination for cathedrals) than on the cultural antagonism inherent in the… Full Review
March 31, 2016
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Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, July 4–September 27, 2015
The exhibition Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White is as spare and elegant as the painting it celebrates. It presents James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, isolated on a deep grey wall. Quotes from the eminently quotable Whistler and his critics punctuate adjacent walls, as does a copy of the artist’s etching Black Lion Wharf (1859), identified as the framed print in the portrait’s background. The simple installation hews to the painting’s logic, for as Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London… Full Review
March 31, 2016
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Exhibition schedule: Sharjah Art Museum and other locations across Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, March 5–June 5, 2015
The subtitle for the twelfth edition of the Sharjah Biennial—“the past, the present, the possible”—is a term that curator Eungie Joo took from an essay by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who wrote about the concept of the right to the city, calling city dwellers to action in collectively shaping their urban environments. Within the context of Joo’s biennial, the title was deployed to address the role of contemporary art—how art is a vehicle to freely express the intangible through tangible form. Enter Steel Rings (2013) by Rayyane Tabet. On the ground floor of the Sharjah Art Museum, I encountered… Full Review
March 31, 2016
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Robin Kelsey
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 416 pp.; 9 color ills.; 57 b/w ills. Cloth $32.95 (9780674744004)
On first glance, Robin Kelsey’s Photography and the Art of Chance appears to be a playful book. Its cover features three orange balls against a bright blue sky, a detail from Conceptual artist John Baldessari’s 1973 photographic series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts). However, in both its physical heft and intellectual ambitions, this is not a light or lighthearted book. Instead, this study of photography from its beginnings in the 1830s to its acceptance by the U.S. art world in the 1970s combines a history of the medium with… Full Review
March 24, 2016
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Loretta Yarlow, ed.
Exh. cat. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 200 pp.; 160 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9781625341341)
Exhibition schedule: University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, September 10–December 8, 2013
Numerous books have been written about William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. While he is revered for his contributions as a sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist, Du Bois was also a poet, playwright, and novelist, and believed very deeply in the social and political potency of art. Art historians have noted the great influence this pioneering figure had on the careers of early twentieth-century artists. He encouraged the sculptors Meta Warrick Fuller and Edmonia Lewis, as well as the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, to create art that emphasized black subject matter. In his essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois formulated… Full Review
March 24, 2016
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Thomas Crow
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 412 pp.; 200 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300203974)
Thomas Crow’s scholarship has indelibly shaped the reception of Pop in the field of art history. In his 1996 book, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press), Crow advanced a reading of Andy Warhol that has had a lasting impact on how scholars understand the artist’s conflicted relationship to mass culture. Specifically, he argued that Warhol’s most powerful work examined the breakdown of commodity exchange in postwar society, an impulse connected to a tradition of truth-telling in U.S. commercial culture. Crow’s interpretation has come to stand for one of the primary methodological approaches to Pop—the “referential”… Full Review
March 24, 2016
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Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard, eds.
London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. 268 pp.; 54 b/w ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780500238950)
The title under review is about the long lives of books—their authors and content, influential readers and reception. There is something highly satisfying about the structure of the book, for our experience of the changing shape of art history is primarily through the reading of books and measuring their impact from the ensuing debates. Despite the choice of books (rather than the theories, methodologies, or figures that usually structure surveys of modern art historiography), most of the chosen works did articulate a position in the discipline, and most of the essays in The Books That Shaped Art History demonstrate just… Full Review
March 24, 2016
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Massimiliano Gioni
Exh. cat. New York: New Museum in association with Skira Rizzoli, 2015. 142 pp. Cloth $50.00 (9780847847198)
Exhibition Schedule: New Museum, New York, June 10–September 13, 2015
The midcareer retrospective of the German painter Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) at the New Museum arrives with ample fanfare. Many regard Oehlen as one of the most important painters of his generation, and Home and Garden, organized by artistic director Massimiliano Gioni with curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and assistant curator Natalie Bell, is his first solo museum exhibition in New York. The title, suggested by Oehlen, refers to the idea of both interior and exterior spaces, a thematic thread that runs through the artist’s work, while also making a sly reference to decorating magazines. A more appropriate title might have… Full Review
March 17, 2016
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Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg, eds.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 13, 2014–April 19, 2015
The interactive website “Object:Photo, The Thomas Walther Collection” (visited March 2016) presents an archive of 241 photographs acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2001. The site is part of a multiplatform rollout, including a catalogue (Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014) and an exhibition (Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949). All three components showcase new research and scholarship on the collection, which was partially supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The “Object:Photo” website features traditional scholarly essays… Full Review
March 17, 2016
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Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 408 pp.; 71 b/w ills. Paper $27.95 (9780822350859)
Increasing attention to the systemic violence endured by African Americans is raising fundamental questions about what it is like to inhabit that identity. What does it mean to be African American? How does the experience of the African American subject shape the identity of the nation itself? History, of course, informs both these questions and any attempt at answering them. Given that race is partly a visual construct, how African Americans see and are seen is an essential part of this narrative. Since its inception, photography has influenced “habits of looking” (42). Neither fully a photo history nor fully… Full Review
March 17, 2016
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Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2014. 297 pp. (9788480265010)
Exhibition schedule: Museum Reina Sofía, Madrid, November 12, 2014–April 13, 2015; Palacio de Cultura Banamex, Mexico City, May 27–September 20, 2015; Museo Amparo, Puebla, October 24, 2015–February 15, 2016
In the fall of 1949, Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990) and his wife Marianne Gast arrived in Mexico. They had spent the last year in Santillana del Mar near the prehistoric cave of Altamira, working with a group of artists that came to be known as La Escuela de Altamira. His stay in Santillana was the culmination of eight prolific years in Spain where his career as an artist began. Employed by the German Consulate in 1941, Goeritz and his wife spent time in Tetouan, Tangier, Malaga, Granada, and Madrid where he befriended many Spanish artists and critics working in the… Full Review
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Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds.
Visual Culture in Early Modernity. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 392 pp.; 15 color ills.; 109 b/w ills. Cloth $129.95 (9781409406846)
“By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial five hundred-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio . . . has bumped him from his perch.” Thus wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 2010, referring to Philip Sohm’s analysis of “Caravaggiomania” (Michael Kimmelman, “Caravaggio in Ascendance: An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine,” New York Times [March 10, 2010]). Five years later, Caravaggio remains among the best-known early modern artists, and along with this popular appeal there has come a flood of literature on the artist—so much, in fact, that scholars are… Full Review
March 10, 2016
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Kathy Halbreich, ed.
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 320 pp.; 545 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780870708893)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 19–August 3, 2014; Tate Modern, London, October 1, 2014–February 8, 2015; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, March 14–July 5, 2015
This major survey of Sigmar Polke’s vast body of work completed its three-city tour with a fitting last stop in Cologne, the artist’s long-time studio base. In putting together the first retrospective to cover all phases of his highly prolific career, Kathy Halbreich, with co-curators Mark Godfrey and Lanka Tattersall, faced an enormous task. The scale of the show was a constant theme in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) press materials and in the many exhibition reviews published as it traveled. Containing 250 works, it counts among the largest exhibitions ever mounted at MoMA, which in turn justified the… Full Review
March 10, 2016
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Dieter Buchhart and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015. 246 pp. Cloth $50.00 (9780847845828)
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum, New York, April 3–August 23, 2015
Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, organized by guest curator Dieter Buchhart and former Associate Curator of Exhibitions Tricia Laughlin Bloom, is an important milestone for the Brooklyn Museum: its opening marks ten years since the museum’s survey of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2005. The exhibition includes 160 pages from 8 notebooks borrowed from the collection of Larry Warsh and around 30 accompanying paintings and drawings. It is worth noting that the artist has not lacked in shows in recent years. In addition to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, of recent note was the retrospective, also organized by Buchhart, at the Art Gallery… Full Review
March 3, 2016
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Nicholas A. Eckstein
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 284 pp.; 50 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300187663)
Nicholas Eckstein’s Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence extricates this intensely studied monument from preoccupations characteristic of traditional art history: patronage, connoisseurship, style, conservation history, technique, and materials. This is notable because all these topics have prompted an extensive scholarship. Giorgio Vasari oriented the chapel to the future and drew a line from the Brancacci frescoes to those by Michelangelo at the Sistine chapel, marking a new tradition of excellence and modernity in Florentine art. Eckstein’s orientation is to the past, and his goal is to understand the chapel as an expression of the multifaceted identity of the… Full Review
March 3, 2016
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