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

Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, and Nicholas Serota, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 298 pp.; 244 color ills.; 82 b/w ills. Paper $45.00 (9780870709487)
Exhibition schedule: Tate Modern, London, April 17–September 7, 2014; Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 25, 2014–February 10, 2015
Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, executed during the last twenty years of the artist’s life, have been taken to exemplify the concept of “late style”—the culmination of a career achieved through intensified abstraction, luminosity, and spiritual expression. Yet, as the recent exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reveals, the series might be better understood as a continuation of the artist’s lifelong interest in the emotional appeal of color; simplified, synthetic line; and the interplay of decorative surfaces, borders, and frames. Despite repeated references to Matisse’s illness and old age in the exhibition catalogue, documentary photographs, and… Full Review
November 12, 2015
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Douglas N. Dow
Visual Culture in Early Modernity.. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 240 pp.; 5 color ills.; 80 b/w ills. Cloth $104.95 (9781409440543)
Douglas N. Dow’s Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform is a welcome contribution to scholarly literature on the under-researched topic of the relationships between Florentine art, devotion, and religious reform in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As Dow observes on the first page of his introduction, the works, authors, and patrons that he examines have not simply been largely overlooked; they seem actively to have been avoided by scholars more preoccupied by earlier trends and later developments (1). Dow’s strategic response to this lacuna is a series of tightly focused case… Full Review
November 12, 2015
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Salt Lake City: Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: February 13–April 18, 2015
Sophie Calle’s thirty-minute video Unfinished (2005), on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), narrates the artist’s troubled fifteen-year investigation of money. The video moves chronologically from Calle’s receipt, in 1988, of seven stills from the security cameras of an American bank, to her acquisition of three full tapes of ATM security footage in 1990, through another thirteen years of her frustrated attempts to use this footage to make sense or art out of money. Taken alone, Unfinished is concerned primarily with its paired investigations of artistic process and the function of money as a mediator between individual… Full Review
November 5, 2015
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Sarah J. Montross, ed.
Exh. cat. Brunswick, ME and Cambridge, MA: Bowdoin College Museum of Art and MIT Press, 2015. 136 pp. Cloth $29.95 (9780262029025)
Exhibition schedule: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, March 5–June 7, 2015
Science fiction and space travel are only one facet of this unusual and ambitious exhibition, which brings together an array of disparate artworks addressing multiple intertwined subjects ranging from the cosmic and geologic to the technological, social, political, and environmental. Curator Sarah Montross proposes four broad themes for organizing the multiplicity of works: the “new man” of the technological future; space travel and its depiction through visual technologies; American landscapes and time travel; and utopian/dystopian futures. The layout of the exhibition largely corresponds to these topics, and simultaneously creates marked divisions between work by artists from the United States and… Full Review
November 5, 2015
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Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli, eds.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 400 pp.; 8 color ills.; 133 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 ( 9781442649330)
Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli’s edited volume, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity, is the latest contribution to a growing body of English-language scholarship on photography in Italy. As Hill and Minghelli state in their introduction to the volume, their goal is to reveal something of “the current global culture of the image” (4) within the triangulation of Italian identity, photography, and modernity. Although not intended as a national history, the book nonetheless makes a claim for the particularity of the Italian case, arguing that Italy’s relationship to both photography and modernity has historically… Full Review
November 5, 2015
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Ann Temkin
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 264 pp. Cloth $45.00 (9780870709463)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015
Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not A Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a collaborative project between Robert Gober; Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture; and Paulina Pobocha, assistant curator. The exhibition, at its heart, reflects Gober’s curatorial practice. This role is not a new one for the artist. In 2009, Gober organized Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, with Cynthia Burlingham, at the Hammer Museum of Art; and for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, he curated a selection of Forrest Bess’s work. Indeed, as MoMA Director Glenn Lowry notes in… Full Review
October 29, 2015
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John Marciari and Suzanne Boorsch
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2013. 256 pp.; 194 color ills.; 13 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300135480)
Exhibition schedule: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014
Francesco Vanni (1563/64–1610), the leading Sienese painter at the turn of the seventeenth century, was an innovative religious iconographer, a gifted draftsman, and an occasional printmaker. Despite his considerable accomplishments, he has never been the sole subject of a full monograph or exhibition—until now. Inspired by Yale University Art Gallery’s acquisition in 2003 of Vanni’s Madonna della Pappa painting (ca. 1599), the exhibition appeared only in New Haven. The accompanying catalogue provides an extensive examination of the artist’s works, focusing on his preparatory drawings for altarpieces, his three autograph etchings, and the many prints by other artists based on his… Full Review
October 29, 2015
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Francisco de Hollanda and Alice Sedgwick Wohl
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 312 pp.; 10 b/w ills.; 10 ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780271059662)
Francisco de Hollanda (1517–84) begins Da Pintura Antigua (1548) by closely paraphrasing Vitruvius’s introduction to book 6 of De Architectura, in which the Roman author notes that the best preparation for the whims of Fortuna is knowledge—both education and the mastery of one’s profession. Hollanda’s knowledge of the theory and practice of art, however, seems to have offered him little protection from a poor critical fortune. After his work was finally published in the nineteenth century, many historians of art dismissed it as that of a pretentious and parochial artist. This reception, which is usefully outlined by Ángel González… Full Review
October 29, 2015
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Laura Hoptman
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014. 176 pp.; 135 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780870709128)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World is the rather ominous title of a sprawling exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The title alone almost seems to threaten the very existence of any and all future endeavors in painting. Seventeen artists from just three countries (nine women and eight men), all born after 1954, make up the group selected by Laura Hoptman, curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, to carry the banner of painting into the future and, perhaps, back into the past. The term “atemporality” was coined by science fiction writer… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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Craig Campbell
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 288 pp.; 19 b/w ills. Paper $27.00 (9780816681068)
In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously refused to reprint what he referred to as the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a child, but he reflected on its meaning and details extensively (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). In Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia, Craig Campbell reverses this strategy, presenting many photographs and photographic fragments of early twentieth-century Siberia, but refusing to analyze or discuss individual images. This is a deliberate choice, one that stems from Campbell’s assumption that photographs are… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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David Bindman
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 220 pp.; 30 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780300197891)
From the outset, David Bindman makes it clear that Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Their Critics is about the use and abuse of Immanuel Kant in interpretations of sculpture. In his preface, he states that the book constitutes a defense of a “discrete” Kantianism. He argues that Kant’s ideas circulated and trickled down, pervading theoretical aesthetics and artists’ discourses—but that the ideas were transformed in the process. Bindman’s convincing claim is that a vulgar or unauthorized Kantianism operated in the work of the main sculptors of Kant’s era, between about 1780 and 1840—including the medium’s two leading practitioners… Full Review
October 22, 2015
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Gaylord Torrence, ed.
New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014. 320 pp. $65.00 (9780847844586)
Exhibition schedule: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 19, 2014–January 11, 2015; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 9–May 10, 2015
On the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a series of tipis situated alongside Claes Oldenburg and Coojse van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks (1994) provides an intriguing glimpse of The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky, an exhibition curated by Gaylord Torrence, senior curator of American Indian Art at the museum. The juxtaposition between the tents and the sculpture draws attention to their design similarities while also suggesting that tipis have become objects of American kitsch, much like Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s badminton birdie. Despite such associations, guests are invited to enter the conical structures to observe the unique… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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Robert Farris Thompson
Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2011. 179 pp.; 126 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781934772959)
Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music is arguably Robert Farris Thompson’s most canonical study of visual art, music, and dance in the Black Atlantic world. True to its subject, the book attempts to identify and examine commonly held traits among these modes of creative expression. Presented in twenty-five relatively short chapters (two of which are interviews), the book is effective in its aim by providing readers with a broad yet simultaneously succinct view of Afro-Atlantic music, dance, art, and, more importantly, the individualized and collective cultural meanings ascribed to each of these artistic outlets. Aesthetic of the Cool… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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Scott Bukatman
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 286 pp.; 31 color ills.; 38 b/w ills. Paper $31.95 (9780520265721)
Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit appears, at first glance, to be a book about the work of pioneering cartoonist, animator, and chalk-talker Winsor McCay (1867–1934). After all, McCay’s most celebrated work—Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11)—is explicitly referenced in the title, and three illustrations from two distinct Little Nemo strips adorn the front and back cover. But Bukatman’s book, although organized around an extended examination of McCay’s life and work, is much more ambitious than this. For Bukatman, Slumberland is not merely a fictional nation visited by Nemo in the strip that bears… Full Review
October 15, 2015
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New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, December 12, 2014–July 12, 2015
Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time is a site-specific mural installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Herstory Gallery, organized by Saisha M. Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. A multimedia artist known for articulating feminist and queer narratives that weave religious, mythological, and popular iconographies, Ganesh (b. 1975) was born and raised in a Hindu Indian family in Brooklyn and Queens. Her wide-ranging practice—which includes drawings, photographic digital collages, text-based works, and collaborations—draws from a vast array of canonical images and historical writings, both worshiped and vernacular, in the pursuit of an expansive and at times… Full Review
October 8, 2015
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