Recently Published Reviews

The appearance of lush dresses or a cute pair of kitten heels in a museum might strike the contemporary viewer as incongruous. But why is this? By now we have become accustomed to seeing design objects displayed cheek by jowl with the hidebound mediums of painting and sculpture. The intrepid museum visitor once had to seek out the designed object, which was relegated to discrete period rooms or wholly separate sections devoted to the so-called decorative arts. This separation, however, is no more. Indeed, as the recent reinstallation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of early twentieth-century modern art… Full Review

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art, a volume of essays on a wide range of topics related to the study of Egyptian art, is part of Blackwell’s series “Companions to the Ancient World.” The book as a whole is impressive in its scope and theoretical sophistication, helpful to students of both Egyptology and art history, and vital as a snapshot of the current state of Egyptian art history. Its editor, Melinda Hartwig, is to be thanked for the thought and effort involved in producing such a volume, particularly in assembling the impressive list of contributors. The collection is organized… Full Review

Architectural historian Henry Matthew’s Greco-Roman Cities of Aegean Turkey: History, Archaeology, Architecture is intended to be an educated layperson’s detailed travel companion to the archaeological sites of western Turkey. Given Turkey’s popularity as a tourist destination for history buffs, it is surprising that such a book has not been written previously. As such, it fills a lacuna and is a welcome addition to the genre of guidebooks in the vein of Freya Stark’s Ionia: A Quest (London: John Murray, 1954), George Ewart Bean’s Aegean Turkey: An Archaeological Guide (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), Ekrem Akurgal’s Ancient Civilizations and Ruins… Full Review

Few sites in China have engaged the religious imagination with more intensity than Mount Wutai, so named for its five “peaks” or “platforms.” Situated in northeast Shanxi Province, nowadays a four-hour bus ride from the city of Taiyuan, and long considered the abode of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, Mount Wutai has been a destination of pilgrimage for people of all walks of life. The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796) famously visited the site six times during his life. Not surprisingly, Mount Wutai has been the subject of a number of recent English-language studies, which encompass such fields as literary studies… Full Review

By 1600, there were over fifty miraculous images in Florence: weeping Madonnas, bleeding Christs, paintings and sculptures—often veiled and only occasionally exposed to direct view, surrounded by heaps of votive offerings left by the faithful in gratitude for miracles experienced. Their proliferation during the previous three hundred years in churches, oratories, and street tabernacles throughout the city occurred alongside the founding of many more cults across Florence’s hinterland, or contado. Indeed, as the commune extended its territorial domain, so the new subject-cities spawned miraculous images—a process of sacralization strongly supported by the Florentine regime. With painstaking scholarship, Megan… Full Review

The Berthouville Treasure, discovered by a farmer in Normandy, France (ancient Gaul), in 1830, represents one of the largest and best-preserved collections of Roman silver to survive from the ancient world. The objects, most of which date to the second and third centuries CE, were found within the confines of a large sanctuary to the god Mercury, and functioned as votive objects. The treasure, on loan from the Département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is on display as part of the exhibition Ancient Luxury and the Roman Silver Treasure from Berthouville at the Getty… Full Review

In his contribution to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Visual Blues, R. A. Lawson writes, “The Harlem Renaissance could not have happened in the South, but it could not have happened without the South” (31; emphasis in original). This statement deftly establishes the raison d’être of the exhibition: to interpret the Harlem Renaissance as a northern phenomenon indebted to its southern musical roots in blues and jazz music. The book draws upon earlier studies that paired African American music and visual arts such as The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, edited… Full Review

The Mystic Ark is not for the faint of heart. The title refers to one of the most dazzling scholarly achievements of the Middle Ages, an astonishing work that emerged from the intense environment of theological debate that marked Paris as the intellectual capital of twelfth-century Europe. Hugh of Saint Victor (ca. 1096–1141) can be credited as the author of this ambitious undertaking, though “author” does not quite reflect the true nature and full extent of Hugh’s work. Unlike his other major projects, such as the better-known De sacramentis christianae fidei, The Mystic Ark was not conceived as a… Full Review

Billed as the “first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary art of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora,” Memory, Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora is the culmination of a year-long series of events and programs that took place during 2014 at Haverford College. Initiated by Visiting Associate Professor Carol Solomon, the program included an undergraduate curatorial praxis seminar (spring 2014), two Mellon-funded artists’ residencies (March 2014), an exhibition at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (fall 2014), and a fully illustrated catalogue. Solomon curated the two-month-long exhibition in collaboration with her seminar students, who… Full Review

Charles Colbert sets Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art against the backdrop of industrialization. His book addresses a range of artists and critics who worked between the 1840s and 1910s—a period of time that saw the rise of the transcontinental railroad, the factory system, and the modern city. Colbert asserts that within the explosive consumer culture these developments engendered, visual art threatened to become just another object or commodity. But, it did not; rather, he observes over the course of the long nineteenth century a “growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high… Full Review

On a trip to Los Angeles during graduate school, I made my way to the Mondrian hotel on the Sunset Strip to see James Turrell’s Hi Test (1996). On every floor, light emanated from a hole in the wall shaped like a television screen (pre-flat screen). The sources of light were out of sight, televisions hidden, each tuned to a different channel, each producing diverse, ever-modulating tones. As I read Nancy Troy’s book, even before I reached her discussion of the hotel in question, I found myself working hard to recall the details of that visit, which I hadn’t thought… Full Review

While the core argument of Michael W. Cole’s Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure owes something to his brilliant article “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body” (Art History 24, no. 4 [September 2001]: 520–51), his subsequent work on later sixteenth-century Florentine art has facilitated a book of broader significance. The opening lines signal Cole’s critical self-positioning: Historians of Italian Renaissance art like origin stories. When we write or talk about our period, we pause at those moments when art began to employ new or newly recovered visual idioms: perspective, for example, or… Full Review

Hypercities is an unruly book that does not want to behave. With its attendant website, it is neither fish nor fowl, for it is simultaneously a scholarly book, an introduction to a digital mapping platform, an extension of web-based projects that use the platform, and an activist text. Yet, rather than a lack of organization or rigor on the part of the authors, their intent is clearly to present the reader with a mash-up of genres and points of entry that strive for multiple users along a spectrum ranging from coders, to academics just getting their feet wet in… Full Review

Craig Clunas’s Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China is a new landmark in the study of the history of the visual and material culture of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644), succeeding his five earlier and equally important monographs on the arts and culture of this period, including Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) (click here for review) and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003) (click here for review). Screen of Kings provides a revisionist view of the role of… Full Review

Jacques Derrida loved the word “observe.” He paid special attention to its root word, “serve” (in French: server), which tied observation to respect, service, and deference. To observe something, he thought, was an act of humility. You gave yourself over to the details, gathering data and storing it in reserve for the future (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 23). Stan Douglas uses lens-based media to facilitate this kind of servitude to details. I mention Derrida not to overemphasize the theoretical… Full Review