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

Jennifer L. Roberts
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 240 pp.; 25 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780520251847)
In a world where vast collections of digital image libraries like Artstor allow works of art from any place or time to be accessed and saved on hard drives, we need not consider the weight, scale, and fragility of objects, nor how they travel from the nebulous space of “the cloud” to our screens. In Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, Jennifer Roberts argues that we should not ignore the materiality of images or the often fraught processes of transporting them in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. In three chapters she demonstrates that John Singleton Copley… Full Review
May 28, 2015
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Leo G. Mazow
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. 216 pp.; 44 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $84.95 (9780271050836)
Is there a post-postmodern approach to the art of Thomas Hart Benton, the opinionated, controversial polymath? One that expands an understanding of this larger-than-life artist in humanistic terms while laying bare his manifold contradictions: the short man who drew elongated bodies; the Parisian-trained painter who disavowed the avant-garde and its “cubes”; the man of ideas who read John Dewey while lambasting urban intelligentsia; and, last but not least, the scion of politicians who eschewed public service to travel around the country to reach out to the everyman? In the 1970s and 1980s, art historians strove to unfix Benton’s status as… Full Review
May 21, 2015
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Jenelle Porter, ed.
Exh. cat. Boston and New York: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in association with Prestel, 2014. 256 pp.; 125 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (97837913538521)
Exhibition schedule: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, October 1, 2014–January 4, 2015; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, January 30–April 5, 2015; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, May 8–August 2, 2015
Before even reaching the five main galleries dedicated to Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), visitors encounter the tangled mass of neon-green and sea-blue crocheted strands of Sheila Pepe’s “site-responsive” sculpture, Put Me Down Gently (2014), cascading down the atrium walls. The work extends to the elevator shaft, where more parachute cords, laces, and yarn become visible through the glass of the car as it ascends the length of the building. Though not covering every surface, the fiber envelopes the space, its inherent materiality challenging the hard, clean architecture of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed… Full Review
May 21, 2015
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Carol Magee
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 256 pp.; 6 color ills.; 16 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9781617031526)
Although popular culture and its incidental pleasures are constantly consumed, such things are not usually assessed with the same meticulous and critical lenses trained upon other forms of culture. Indeed, despite the victories of cultural studies, there is still less ink spilt (or keys tapped) on close academic analyses of pop culture than objects classed as “art.” Carol Magee’s Africa in the American Imagination is a welcome—and exemplary—exception to the rule (though certainly scholars such as Sidney Kasfir have addressed similar pop-cultural topics [Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity, Bloomington: Indiana University… Full Review
May 21, 2015
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Exhibition schedule: Harvard Art Museums, November 16, 2014–July 26, 2015
On Sunday, November 16, 2014, ambitious Boston museumgoers could have treated themselves to first-viewings of two remarkable achievements: Mark Rothko’s newly restored Harvard Murals, currently installed in the Harvard Art Museums’ impeccable Renzo Piano-designed galleries, and Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour behind-the-scenes chronicle of the London museum presented by the filmmaker himself at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The coincidence would have delighted Wiseman, whose wry observation of institutions, in both their operational perversities and decorous self-presentation, seems tailor made for the museum’s grand performance before its many audiences. But where National Gallery is rich in quotidian… Full Review
May 14, 2015
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Timothy O. Benson, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Prestel, 2014. 296 pp.; 228 color ills.; 13 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9783791353401)
Exhibition schedule: Kunsthaus Zürich (under the title Expressionism in Germany and France: From Matisse to the Blue Rider), Zürich, February 7–May 11, 2014; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, June 8–September 14, 2014; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, October 6, 2014–January 25, 2015
Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky examines the connections between the avant-garde art worlds in France and Germany in the years between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, considering the influence of artists like Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse on German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Franz Marc. To that end, the network of cultural exchange—exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues, visits by German artists to France and vice versa, dealers and critics who served to link the two art worlds—is a… Full Review
May 14, 2015
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Barbara London and Anne Hilde Neset
Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. 84 pp.; 70 color ills. Paper $18.95 (9780870708886)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, August 10–November 3, 2013
Soundings: A Contemporary Score was the first major exhibition of “sound” at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), which Christopher Phillips once famously characterized as “the seat of judgment.” But it encompassed far more than the exhibited sixteen artists from ten countries. It was a large and integrated program of exhibition, films, sound performances, workshops, and lectures overseen by Barbara London, associate curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art, and curatorial assistant Leora Morinis. This review can merely outline some of these concerns by reducing the vast array of diverse impulses brought together into a few basic categories… Full Review
May 14, 2015
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Kendall H. Brown, ed.
Exh. cat. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2013. 320 pp.; 458 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780883971574)
Exhibition schedule: Japan Society Gallery, New York, March 16–June 10, 2012; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, July 14, 2012–January 20, 2013; Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Albuquerque, February 9–April 21, 2013; Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, TX, June 15–October 20, 2013; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, November 22, 2013–January 19, 2014; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, February 8–April 20, 2014; Seattle Asian Art Museum, Seattle, May 10–October 19, 2014; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, November 8, 2014–January 18, 2015; Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, February 7–July 19, 2015; Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, Washington, DC, June 11–December 31, 2016
Deco Japan is a rambunctious assemblage of objects from the late 1920s and 1930s that evokes the excitement and instability of an era in which urbanization, international communication, global travel, mass-market consumerism, and the expansion of imperial ambitions were transforming the everyday lives and imaginations of millions, while spurring artists and designers in particular to rethink their art in relation to the new world that was taking shape around them. Curated and with an accompanying catalogue edited by Kendall H. Brown, the traveling exhibition had its longest run in Seattle, invited by the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s new curator of… Full Review
May 7, 2015
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Andrew V. Uroskie
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 288 pp.; 100 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (9780226842998)
In the closing pages of his fine book Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, Andrew V. Uroskie delivers a vivid explication of Ken Dewey’s multimedia project Selma Last Year (1966). With this work, Dewey proposes to redefine the social character of media through sophisticated interrelations of technology and live performance contingent to a viewer’s presence: “the act of spectatorship itself [was] staged” (226). The stakes of this staging are evidenced in the work’s radical reconfiguration from its first to its second iteration. The work was initially conceived as an exhibition of photographs… Full Review
May 7, 2015
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Carole Paul, ed.
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. 368 pp.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781606061206)
This anthology stems from the Getty’s three-pronged publications program which, in addition to the museum, includes the Conservation and the Research Institutes. Going far beyond the catalogues of permanent collections or special exhibitions that are the more customary publishing outlets for museums, an extensive and variegated scholarly literature has been the result. The current volume focuses on the origins and early development of the major Continental and English art museums during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With thirteen essays, mostly on individual examples, each by different specialists, the studies have in common their orientation toward the earliest phases… Full Review
May 7, 2015
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Catherine Coleman Brawer and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik
New York: Andrea Monfried Editions, 2014. 240 pp.; 230 color ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780991026302)
While reading Catherine Coleman Brawer and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik’s splendid new book, The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière, I thought—it’s time to go to Nebraska. For it is in its state capital, Lincoln, where one can see Meière’s extraordinary suite of mosaic murals done for the interior domes and floor of the state capitol. Completed between 1924 and 1932, the project catapulted Meière (1892–1961) to the status of one of the nation’s foremost mosaicists and architectural decorators. The primary focus of this excellent study is Meière’s Art Deco projects, which Brawer and Skolnik organize into various… Full Review
April 30, 2015
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Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 336 pp.; 23 color ills.; 56 b/w ills. Cloth $99.00 (9780199678136)
In late Renaissance Italy, prosperous individuals had the luxury of options when it came to such essential concerns as diet, dwelling, grooming, and sleep. Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, the authors of Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, look carefully at what Renaissance Italians did to preserve their well-being and at the medical arguments behind these determinations; in doing so, they furnish a key for understanding the behaviors, attitudes, and material culture of the period. A holistic study on this topic of preventative healthcare is long overdue. Cavallo and Storey’s remarkably diversified approach to the intersection between medical theory… Full Review
April 30, 2015
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Donal Cooper and Janet Robson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 296 pp.; 60 color ills.; 134 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300195712)
Donal Cooper and Janet Robson have given scholars, students, and general enthusiasts a long-needed tool for understanding and appreciating the decorative program in the Upper Church of the Basilica at Assisi. For decades, art-historical literature on the famous fresco cycle depicting the life of St. Francis focused almost exclusively on the Giotto/non-Giotto attribution question. What little had been published concerning the basilica’s patronage and iconography was either written in German or Italian and thus inaccessible to many, or else treated only particular themes within its decoration. This is not another book on Giotto at Assisi (thankfully). Instead, the authors successfully… Full Review
April 30, 2015
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Elizabeth T. Goizueta, ed.
Exh. cat. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2014. 150 pp.; 50 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9781892850232)
Exhibition schedule: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, August 30–December 14, 2014; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, February 14–May 24, 2015
The Jungle (1943) no longer hangs by the coatroom of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as John Yau once decried (“Please Wait by the Coatroom,” Art Magazine 63, no. 4 [December 1988]: 56–59), and no doubt the critical fortunes of Wifredo Lam have risen auspiciously over the past quarter-century. Lam scholarship surged in the 1990s and early 2000s amid a disciplinary climate in full flush of postcolonial revision and a continuing anthropological turn. From the exhibition Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938–1952 (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992) to the publication of Lowery Stokes Sims’s definitive monograph, Wifredo… Full Review
April 23, 2015
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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco:
Exhibition schedule: Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, September 21, 2013–February 16, 2014; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, March 7–April 27, 2014; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, February 15–May 17, 2015; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, September 3, 2015–January 9, 2016
Alien She, organized by and exhibited at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh before opening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, examines the influence of the feminist punk rock movement Riot Grrrl on artists working today. Curated by Ceci Moss and Astria Suparak, the exhibition presents archival materials (zines, mixtapes, music playlists, cassettes, fliers, t-shirts, video footage, and other ephemera) from the Riot Grrrl movement as well as work by seven contemporary artists whose “visual art practices were informed by their contact with Riot Grrrl,” according to the exhibition brochure. What… Full Review
April 23, 2015
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