Recently Published Reviews

What is the place of politicized violence within democratic society, and what role do fine artists play in this debate? Ross Barrett takes up these questions in Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art, a thematic study that probes how American painters working between 1820 and 1890 navigated “the ideological difficulties and symbolic possibilities” (3) of the subject of insurrection. Barrett’s case-study approach focuses five trim chapters on seven easel paintings inspired by specific incidents of contemporary political unrest. Employing a diverse range of evidence including artist biography, historical context, popular visual culture, formal analysis, and… Full Review

Northern Italian courts served as vital incubators for Renaissance artists, yet they are often overshadowed by larger cities such as Rome and Florence. Powerful rulers, discerning collectors, and taste-making humanists resided in these autonomous principalities. Renaissance Splendors of the Northern Italian Courts provides some much needed attention for these important artistic centers. Curated by Bryan Keene and Christopher Platts, the exhibition focuses on fifteenth-century manuscripts produced in Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and other Italian court cities. Despite being limited to a single gallery, it features works of art commissioned and produced by some of the most influential patrons and artists of… Full Review

Michalis Pichler’s The Ego and Its Own takes ownership of Max Stirner’s philosophical incantation of the same name originally published in 1844. Appearing four years before the Communist Manifesto, Stirner’s text aimed at “not an overthrow of an established order but . . . elevation above it” (Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907). Both books are split into two parts: part 1, entitled “Man,” considers the ways in which an individual defines her or his substance, be it citizenship (“Political Liberalism”), labor (“Social Liberalism”), or critical activity (“Humane Liberalism”); part 2… Full Review

At the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) exhibition City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India, visitors found themselves standing face to face with the father of the Indian nation and one of history’s most fervent critics of Western material culture. But in Debanjan Roy’s India Shining V (2008), the earphone-wearing Mahatma was covered from head to toe in shiny red automotive paint and had his eyes fixed firmly on an iPod screen. The title of the piece makes direct reference to the eponymous slogan used by India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the 2004 general elections to… Full Review

In 2016, the much-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is slated to open on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The museum’s mission, as stated on its website, “to help all Americans see just how central African American history is for all,” links the act of viewing to the acts of remembrance and understanding the museum promotes. Fittingly, Mabel O. Wilson devotes the prologue and epilogue of her study of twentieth-century black-organized public history exhibitions and museums, Negro Buildings: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, with the circumstances surrounding the NMAAHC… Full Review

As I walked through the Wadsworth Atheneum’s recent large-scale exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008, I could not help but ask: Did we really need a show on Coney Island? What does it bring to the intellectual and aesthetic table, so to speak, that would be important or crucial now? In theory, there are a number of compelling reasons to mount this show: a Coney Island exhibition would span a broad historical period; pull from a diversity of objects and media, thus expanding museum dialogues; and provide a platform for confronting race, class, gender, sexuality, and… Full Review

In the last decade, the study of eighteenth-century Qing court art has become its own subfield of late imperial Chinese art, with specific objectives pursued from a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective. In the wake of the revisionist “New Qing History” that has sought to displace the Sinocentrism of earlier historical narratives, the art commissioned by the last dynasty’s non-Han ruling elite has come to appear more complex than what the labels “hybrid” or “exotic” might convey. (On the objectives of the New Qing History, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 [Winter 2004]: 193–206.) Tibetan, Mongolian, Inner… Full Review

As part of the celebrations attending its eightieth anniversary, the Musée Marmottan Monet organized an exhibition of its namesake’s famous work Impression, soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise, 1872). The painting has long been considered the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection, and the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue offer an opportunity to present new research on this well-studied picture. Readers familiar with the extensive literature may wonder whether there remains anything left to be said about this painting. In other words, what light can this new research shed on Monet’s Sunrise? What significance does the painting… Full Review

When the artist Jack Whitten (b. 1939) refers to his studio as a laboratory, he is speaking literally, not metaphorically. Fridges and industrial freezers are stocked with muffin tins, pans, and molds of all kinds filled with acrylic paint. Covering the walls are tools of every shape and size—many of which are homemade concoctions. Whitten even looks the part of a scientist; his studio uniform consists of a paint-splattered white lab coat and sneakers he spray-painted silver. Although Whitten frequently acknowledges his debt to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Norman Lewis—artists he… Full Review

Although the Iron Age (circa 1200 to 600 BCE) Levant (a zone covering territory in present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan) is not familiar ground for most art historians, Marian H. Feldman’s masterful book Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant will draw diverse readers into its dynamic world aswirl with social networks and enchanting objects. Feldman focuses on the ninth to seventh centuries BCE in the Levant, but her study casts back to the second millennium BCE and projects geographically east of the Tigris River in what is now Iraq… Full Review

In her recently published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings, artist Renée Green describes her 1999 exhibition Partially Buried in Three Parts as an exploration “of genealogical traces,” where overlapping investigations examine the ways people reinterpret their past to their “contemporary relations to a natal patria” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, 275–276). The exhibition, for Green, was also a meditation on what site-specificity might mean when the concept of location is increasingly “affected for many by circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one’s computer screen is and when memory is… Full Review

Katherine Roeder’s new monograph on Winsor McCay nicely bridges the divide between the sometimes insular scholarship on comic art and the broader field of what I have taken to calling visual modernities. Expanding beyond the fine arts, visual modernities includes animation, comics, early film, poster art, photography, and everyday design, all of which emerged as the vernacular face of twentieth-century visual and media modernization. In Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, Roeder situates her subject’s prolific career within the context of rising consumerism, urban middle-class anxieties, and modernist self-reflexivity. McCay… Full Review

The exhibition In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art featured thirty-four artists, most of whom live in Haiti, and, according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, over “70 of their paintings, prints, sculptures, installations and mixed-media pieces drawn mainly from loans as well as the museum’s holdings” (8) representing a richer and complex set of cultural and spiritual histories. The well-illustrated catalogue, edited by Donald J. Cosentino (professor emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA), presents a rich analysis of the power of the visual and the complex relationships among regeneration, spirituality, and the livability of death. … Full Review

Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibition The Times at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is the New York-based artist’s first West Coast show. The exhibition is also a homecoming for the artist, who grew up in the neighboring city of Santa Ana. Before traveling to Orange County, The Times spent four months at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The idea for these two exhibitions came from James Cohan Gallery’s debut spring 2014 show, entitled Fred Tomaselli: Current Events. As the artist’s gallery representation, James Cohan dedicated Current Events to exploratory artworks that Tomaselli colloquially calls capriccetti… Full Review

Allora and Calzadilla: Intervals brings together new and recent work by the Puerto Rico-based artists whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the ethical and affective dimensions of political resistance. Working collaboratively since meeting as art students in 1995, the Philadelphia-born Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla are perhaps most widely known for their exhibition Gloria at the American Pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. That exhibition’s memorably monumental pieces—an ATM machine built into a pipe organ or a treadmill on top of an inverted army tank—packed a spectacular visual punch, mordantly satirizing capitalism, religion, the military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism without necessarily… Full Review