Recently Published Reviews

With a decade of solo exhibitions devoted to the work of nineteenth-century photographers Édouard Baldus (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), Gustave Le Gray (Bibliothèque nationale de France and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), and Roger Fenton (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), French and American museums succeeded in demonstrating that a focus on individual oeuvre, rather than period style, lent some much needed scholarly substance to the early history of photography. Given his significance to the medium’s history, it is a mystery as to why a similarly ambitious monograph on Charles Marville (1813–1879) had not been published until now. Curator Sarah… Full Review

Esra Akcan’s new book on architecture, housing, and the exchange of ideas between Germany and Turkey after the foundation in 1923 of the Turkish Republic is an important addition to the growing body of literature on modern architecture in the late Ottoman and early Turkish states. With the groundbreaking work of Zeynep Çelik followed by significant newer studies by Sibel Bozdoğan, among others, the analysis of Turkish architecture has taken a more prominent role in the literature on the modern Mediterranean cultural world. Scholars have shown how the built environment reveals the tensions between varied colonial or postcolonial interests and… Full Review

In 1751, New Spain’s most famous painter, Miguel Cabrera, was given unusual access to the enormously popular Virgin of Guadalupe icon. By this point, devotees near and far had little doubt that the image in the Tepeyac sanctuary was divinely made, miraculously imprinted on the cloak (tilma) of a humble Indian in the first decade after the conquest. After meticulous examination, scientific analysis, and devotional considerations, Cabrera acknowledged the holy tilma’s incorruptible brilliance—the image’s divine origin was confirmed and its perfection as a work of art was touted in a remarkable treatise entitled Maravilla Americana (1756). Standing… Full Review

Kusakabe Kimbei was a purveyor of early Japanese souvenir photography, a genre often called Yokohama photography due to the key role that city played as a destination for Western travelers. There have been a number of articles and books on the subject published in the last decade, primarily addressing the Western photographers who dominated this market in the 1860s and 1870s, such as Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried. However, by the late 1880s, Japanese photographers became the principal producers of souvenir photography, with Kimbei one of the most successful. Mio Wakita’s Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s… Full Review

No matter what the relationship between art and medicine, I would rather keep it on the aesthetic plain. . . . Why don’t you show your paintings and the thesis in a medical hospital —Betty Parsons, letter to Forrest Bess, 1958 Female patron: The paintings up there are amazing! Male patron: Did you look at the stuff in the middle? Female patron: No. Male patron: Super weird. —exchange in Berkeley Art Museum gift shop, September 2014 Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, the latest retrospective of Forrest Bess’s (1911–1977) work, is one animal on the… Full Review

Jennifer A. Greenhill’s Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers most everything one could wish from a scholarly monograph: discerning judgment, telling anecdotes, historical insights grounded in close visual and intertextual analysis. In describing ways in which late nineteenth-century artists as different as Winslow Homer, Enoch Wood Perry, William Holbrook Beard, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Haberle managed to produce serious art while catering to a “growing public appetite for humor” (2), Greenhill herself strikes an equivalent balance. Consistently erudite, frequently entertaining, benefitting from the wisdom of her choice to focus at length on a relatively few… Full Review

As signaled by its title, visitors to the exhibition The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux learned that the artist (1827–1875) had many: an obsession for art at a young age; an enthusiasm for portraiture; a desire for major government-sponsored commissions; and fervor for work. His was also a life full of passions unrealized, as he died from pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-eight. Yet Carpeaux’s impact on nineteenth-century sculpture was significant. His works fill museums and streets in Paris and in his birthplace of Valenciennes, and he influenced a younger generation of sculptors, including Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. … Full Review

“While George Seurat was the founder of the Neo-Impressionist movement, he was not the first to create portraits in the style”: so announces an initial wall text for Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886–1904 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, curated by Ellen W. Lee and Jane Block. These words accompany a line of four portraits (one by Vincent van Gogh, two by Albert Dubois-Pillets, and one by Achille Laugé), which in turn reveal exciting curatorial minds at work—Face to Face is not yet another exhibition with an object list recycling famous works by famous names. Despite Paul… Full Review

Scholarly literature on the architectural monuments and urban infrastructure of early modern Rome abounds. What distinguishes this collection of essays is its focus on overlooked sites, e.g., the fish market rather than the Trevi Fountain, the ill-formed piazza in front of the Palazzo Zuccari rather than the Piazza del Popolo. The objective, as editor David R. Marshall puts it simply, is to study the sites and sights of Rome, its places (as distinct from its monuments) and, more importantly, the appearance of those places. After looking long and hard at the city of Rome, the essayists make fresh inroads in… Full Review

This multi-author, multi-century account of the evolution of the portrait collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce arrives at an opportune moment. As lead author Karl Kusserow notes at the outset of his introduction, the financial scandals and crises that have defined much of the current century make this volume a timely consideration of how business elites articulate and consolidate identities public and private, and how they address “the predicament of portraying power in a democracy” (6). Picturing Power also joins a recent flurry of rewarding and thoughtful studies of collections and exhibitions in the United States that redirect… Full Review

The Art of Video Games exhibition raises an intriguing question: How should a curator go about making the argument that a medium long associated with mass culture deserves to be taken seriously as an art form? Considering the possible approaches to such a situation, we can look to precedents—cinema provides an obvious analogue. Cinema’s initial tentative steps into the space of the museum during the first half of the twentieth century were governed by a conservative philosophy of curatorial selectivity: early exhibitions were often limited to a small group of exemplary works that seemed appropriately highbrow, appropriately challenging, and, importantly… Full Review

It is fitting that the first major retrospective of John Altoon’s work takes place in his hometown, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), since the show’s assembly necessitated considerable sleuthing by curator Carol S. Eliel, often with the aid of Altoon’s Los Angeles-based contemporaries. John Altoon, a compact show featuring eighteen works on canvas and fifty on paper or board, fills five galleries of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and offers the first comprehensive look at the artist’s prolific oeuvre, or what remains of it (Altoon destroyed much of what he made during the short period… Full Review

How “literate” was Raphael’s art? This question stands at the core of David Rijser’s Raphael’s Poetics, an ambitious study dedicated to the polymorphic relation—as the subtitle goes—between art and poetry in High Renaissance Rome. Divided into four chapters, each devoted to a major work by Raphael, and accompanied by a methodological interlude (surprisingly situated toward the end), the book is a partially revised version of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Institute for Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam in 2006. As a result of Rijser’s multidisciplinary background (he is an intellectual historian with a specific interest… Full Review

For many, the high point of this retrospective of Josef Koudelka’s work will be the series of images of the Soviet invasion of Prague in August of 1968. The photographer had just returned to the city from a trip photographing Roma communities when the seven-day invasion began. Weaving in and among the crowds of protestors, his camera loaded with yards of East German movie film, he managed to capture the fragile power of such instances of collective heroism. Images of conflict between the heavily armed invading forces and the very human Czech resistance combine with those of cleverly detourned propaganda… Full Review

The exhibition A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography, along with curator Anne M. Lyden’s fine catalogue of the same name, bring together the remarkable photography collections of the Royal Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, as well as one notable photograph from a private collection. The exhibition and in particular the catalogue’s essays are insightful and thought-provoking, raising a number of fascinating issues about art, class, democracy, power, tradition, gender, and ways of knowing and seeing in the photographic age. This opportunity to examine the birth of that period both… Full Review