Recently Published Reviews

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue of Andrew Wyeth paintings illustrating views looking out of and through windows are the most recent examples of a sea change in scholarship on the artist. In 1977, Robert Rosenblum called Wyeth at once the most overrated and underrated artist of the twentieth century (cited in Henry Adams, “Wyeth’s World,” Smithsonian Magazine [June 2006]: 84–92). Wanda Corn has labeled the critical and academic hostility to Wyeth’s work throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century “the Wyeth curse.” In 2005, Anne Classen Knutson organized a session called “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth” at the College… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and presented by Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art opened at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in a festival-like manner and included two densely installed museum galleries and a plethora of performances presented in the sculpture garden. At the Walker, Radical Presence featured thirty-six artists—one less than the original showing in Houston due to conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s public and controversial self-removal from the exhibition. Predominantly hashed out during the New York leg of the exhibition’s tour, not much beyond posting the ARTnews article on the subject was made of the… Full Review

Jacques-Louis David casts a long shadow over portraiture during the period of the French Revolution, with the stern visages and intense gestures of members of the Third Estate in The Tennis Court Oath (1792); his iconic portrayal of Jean-Paul Marat lifeless in his bath (1793); his sensitive depiction of the Dutch republican Jacobus Blauw deep in thought at his desk (1795); and eventually his grandiloquent homages to Napoleon, including his portrayal of the Emperor’s coronation (1807). It is to Amy Freund’s immense credit that while she does not lose sight of David’s contributions to the genre, she gives the canonic… Full Review

Maia Wellington Gahtan, director of the MA program in Museum Studies at the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, Italy, brings her professional interest in museological studies to this collection of essays, Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum. Indeed, all thirteen authors demonstrate not only a deep knowledge of Giorgio Vasari but also of art collecting in the Renaissance and the exhibition of Renaissance art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many of the essays were first presented at an international conference in Florence celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Vasari’s birth, and most have long been the… Full Review

Elizabeth Childs’s Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti is several books in one: a survey of the European encounter with Tahiti from Captain Cook to the present; a focused examination of artistic (and to a lesser extent literary) representations of the island from about 1880 to 1901 (the year Paul Gauguin left Tahiti for the Marquesas and both Henry Adams and John La Farge published accounts of their visits); a critique of colonial received ideas about an always “vanishing paradise” in the South Pacific; a focused treatment of the art of Gauguin from his arrival in Tahiti in… Full Review

In 1911, while viewing new works by the emerging Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Albert Paris von Gütersloh suggested that Schiele’s paintings “yearn only for gestures”—an observation that epitomizes the very crux of Schiele’s varied portraits, with their enigmatic visual language of the human body (Albert Paris von Gütersloh, Egon Schiele, Vienna: Brüder Rosenbaum, 1911, 1). Gütersloh, who was a fellow artist, writer, and critic in turn-of-the-century Vienna, was aware of the power of these signs early in Schiele’s career; thus, it is not surprising that Schiele later captured Gütersloh’s likeness (and hand gestures) in a number of… Full Review

The retirement of the eminent architectural historian Deborah Howard from her position at the University of Cambridge, especially following that of Patricia Fortini Brown from Princeton University, marks a major turning point in the teaching of Venetian art and architecture in the academy. To honor Howard, recognized and admired for her rigorous, clear scholarship, as well as her kind, generous nature, some of her many students and friends have edited and contributed to this Festschrift. The volume covers a broad range of topics, both geographically and historically, but the essays are nonetheless tightly focused on particular subjects; many… Full Review

In Other Primary Structures, Jens Hoffmann’s recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the presence of Primary Structures, a show organized by Kynaston McShine at the same museum in 1966, was felt through text and images. Most aggressively, photographic murals of installation views from the earlier exhibition pervaded the galleries. Larger-than-life-size, the images reached from floor to ceiling. In these period photographs, canonical works of Minimalism were pictured, including a Sol LeWitt untitled cube from 1966, Walter De Maria’s stainless steel Cage (1961–65), and Carl Andre’s long row of firebricks, Lever (1966), among others. Instead of being pasted directly… Full Review

In Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, Michael K. Schuessler proposes that a “visible bridge” developed between theater and mural painting in the early years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. To reveal the relationship between written and visual forms of expression and to create a vocabulary and methodology for describing it, Schuessler compares mural paintings in two Augustinian monasteries in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, to a religious play; a chronicle; service codices (documenting indigenous leaders’ military service to the crown); and a description of a staged La batalla de los salvajes (Battle of… Full Review

Most of the essays contained in Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, were presented as lectures during a conference at Villa I Tatti in 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death. As Connors both perceptively and tactfully observes in the introduction’s opening paragraph, the timing was propitious: by 2009 the “cult of personality” that had surrounded Berenson during his life had “dissipated for the most part,” and the approach to the study of art that he had espoused in such spirited fashion throughout his long career no longer stood “at the… Full Review

This compact 2012 paperback edition of Escultura monumental mexica (Monumental Mexica Sculpture) is considerably smaller than the hefty—over 11 inches square, 1 5/8 inches thick—hardback first edition of 2009, yet its importance is equally “monumental.” This stems in no small part from the expertise of its coauthors, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján, two Mexican archaeologists who, over the course of over three-and-a-half decades, have helped lead the effort to recover, reconstruct, and analyze the material culture of the indigenous Mexica (Aztec) peoples of Central Mexico. When the Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés arrived at the Mexica capital in… Full Review

Promoted in the press release as “the first museum-wide exhibition in New York City to feature contemporary art from and about the Arab world,” Here and Elsewhere brought together over forty-five artists from more than fifteen countries. The ambitious exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni with Natalie Bell, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Helga Christoffersen, and Margot Norton, included many artists who had not previously exhibited their work in New York. Despite its expansiveness and regional arrangement (and the fact that many reviewers referred to it as such), the curators were insistent that the exhibition was not a survey. Rather, Here and Elsewhere sought… Full Review

In regards to documentary photography, the issue of responsibility—be it ethical, social, political, or a combination thereof—has been a central concern throughout its polemicized history. One could stretch that argument, along the line of memory, from the last photograph uploaded or tweeted onto the World Wide Web at precisely 00:00 tonight, to the first instances when human presence was registered on a photographic plate, as in the famous view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, where a passerby stopped to have his shoes polished, seen from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s window in 1838. Yet the fundamental difference between such instances and… Full Review

Expo Chicago boasts local pride as another annual art fair to emerge in the United States. Now in its third year, the event took place from September 18–21, 2014, at Navy Pier, a city landmark and hub for tourists, where summer crowds line up to board boat tours and take rides on the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel to view the famed Chicago skyline. Expo Chicago is young within the U.S. art-fair circuit; it emerged in 2012, newly reenvisioned after the former venue for Chicago’s fair, Merchandise Mart, dropped their art event after thirty-two years. The 2014 post-event report showed that… Full Review

In the 1992 postscript to her essay “Patrilineage,” published in Art Journal the year prior, Mira Schor argued for the necessary interruption of male-dominated art history through the production of histories of and by women. “The method is really very simple,” she explained. “It will always be a man’s world unless one seeks out and values the women in it” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 117). Despite the changes of nearly two and a half decades, this lesson remains relevant (sadly, so do many in Schor’s essay): unless… Full Review