Recently Published Reviews

Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection elegantly showcases a recent donation gifted to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It brings Native art into the spotlight alongside the institution’s diverse holdings from its permanent collection, and celebrates the beauty of objects often unknown to both the general art museumgoer and established art connoisseur. The exhibition features a large selection of ceramic works and textiles by Native artists from the southwestern United States, as well as pieces from the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains. The title itself evokes images of the… Full Review

Just beyond the main galleries of the Art of the Americas Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a small room featuring eight large painting by Sam Doyle (1906–1985). The paintings are created from everyday materials, making them distinct from the oil paintings, art deco objects, and mid-century modern furniture in the neighboring galleries. Using house paint on found wood and metal to create figurative and text-based paintings, Doyle portrayed famous African American entertainers and athletes as well as legendary figures, friends, and family from his Gullah birthplace on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The intimate… Full Review

Toward the end of their introduction to the catalogue that accompanied Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrik Goltzius and the Art of Engraving, curators William Breazeale and Victoria Sancho Lobis quote what is certainly the single most incisive sentence in the whole of the Goltzius literature, first framed in Karel van Mander’s 1604 Het Schilder-Boek: “All these things . . . prove that Goltzius is a rare Proteus or Vertumnus in art, because he can transform himself to all forms of working methods” (9). With the Passion and Virtuosity exhibition and catalogue Breazeale and Sancho Lobis aim to illuminate “all… Full Review

The focus of Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness is specific: artworks produced during roughly a three-year period whose subject matter deals with “the peculiar institution.” Copeland sets his sights on four cases: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–93), Lorna Simpson’s Five Rooms (1991), Glenn Ligon’s To Disembark (1993), and Renée Green’s Sites of Genealogy (1990) and Mise-en-Scène (1991). No expense seems to have been spared: the book is large-format and lavishly illustrated. Its size and glossy pages make it a pleasure to hold. From a formal standpoint, the objects relate closely, as… Full Review

The past decade or so has seen a steady march of publications—and particularly monographic studies—on Titian. Several exhibitions, beginning with the masterful show at the Prado (2004) and culminating most recently with the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale (2013), have brought the artworks in dialogue with various themes (such as late style, artistic competition, replicas, etc.) and prompted the enormously helpful scientific evaluation of several pictures. These exhibitions included catalogues with the same titles: among them are Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) (click here for review); Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance… Full Review

The grotesque is not an easy concept to define. One of the strengths of Frances S. Connelly’s The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play is that she accepts this and turns it into a key observation: “Grotesques are by their nature intermixed, unresolved, and impure . . . and to represent them as fixed entities misses their most salient feature” (19). In her interdisciplinary study, the grotesque is analyzed as a leitmotif in modern, Western culture (mainly through visual art and literature) from around 1500 until today. Based on fundamental analyses in the field of art… Full Review

The term for sensory knowledge appears twice in the title of Jacques Rancière’s book—once in transliterated ancient Greek (the “genitive, third declension” aesthesis, meaning “perception via the senses”) and once in the Latinate form innovated by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750 (when he published the first volume of his Aesthetica), which Rancière takes in its adjectival form, aesthetic. There is a clue in this doubling that helps decode this strange and rewarding text: we need an “aesthetic regime of art” to make the space for “aesthesis,” a place of relative sanctuary where “sensible experience” can occur. The… Full Review

Helen Pashgian’s environmental installation Untitled (2012–13), recently displayed in the Art of the Americas Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), consists of a row of twelve, eight-foot-high double columns at roughly ten-foot intervals. Fabricated from thin sheets of molded colorless acrylic with a uniform matte finish, the columns glow peacefully in the dark, black-walled gallery. Upon entering, the visitor needs a moment of adjustment, both for the eyes and the mind. The first impression is one of gentle perplexity: why are these columns arranged in a row and what are the glimmering and gleaming light phenomena… Full Review

That the histories of photography and of the American West are intertwined is a truism in histories and theories of photography, one most frequently evoked in studies on expeditionary and geological survey photographs by such notables as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. Rachel McLean Sailor’s copiously illustrated history of western regional photography does much to ground that truism in the particulars of the medium’s technological evolution and in the region’s events. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West primarily concerns the kinds of photographs that populate local historical societies. These seemingly “uninteresting and uncomplicated” photographs… Full Review

In the Lombeek altarpiece in Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Lombeek (Belgium), created by artists from Brussels in ca. 1525, ornamental fields vary with the biblical subject matter of the figural scenes and, indeed, sustain a secondary discourse. As Ethan Matt Kavaler writes in Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540, “Forced to assimilate the tabernacles [above the figures] to the realm of human actors, [a] viewer might think of the visible world as a finite index of the divine matrix” (108). On the west facade of the Church of La Trinité at Vendôme (France), designed by Jean Texier… Full Review

This book originated in a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in London in June 2009, and the contributors have had ample time to finesse their papers. The editor is to be congratulated for his work in ensuring an improved and coherent collection of essays. He notes at the outset that the authors are “enthusiastic amateurs in the world of Gombrich studies, rather than scholars with the learning to assign him a fixed place in the historiography of art” (4). Given the sheer volume of Ernst Gombrich’s publications, let alone the material available in the Warburg’s archive of his work… Full Review

“Parisiennes . . . form an aristocracy among the women of the world,” states the writer and fashion enthusiast Octave Uzanne in the introduction to his 1894 book, La Femme à Paris, nos contemporaines ([The Women of Paris: Our Contemporaries] Paris: Ancienne maison Quantin, 1894, 5; my translation). In this volume, Uzanne assembled a feminine taxonomy describing the city’s residents, ranging from “great ladies” to the working classes. A conservative aesthete who entreated the modern bourgeoisie to revive eighteenth-century aristocratic graces, Uzanne articulated prevailing cultural anxieties about women, who had gained some freedoms by the 1880s and… Full Review

Fredrika Jacobs’s appealing Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy joins a wave of recent studies on the art of religious devotion in early modern Italy, offering yet another approach to this rich and rapidly developing field. (Full disclosure: my own contribution, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire in Early Modern Italy, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.) Unlike, for instance, Marcia Hall’s The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) (click here for review), Jacobs’s book is not bound to the… Full Review

Any time you have a chance to see a photography exhibition drawn from the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, take it. These shows are few and far between: the last one opened eight years ago, when curator Gloria Williams Sander acknowledged the full idiosyncratic range of the department with her remarkable exhibition, The Collectible Moment (2006–7). Even a small glimpse of the collection affords the rare chance for a trip to the 1960s and 1970s, the moment just before big business gripped Los Angeles culture by the throat. It was a time when the contemporary mandate for… Full Review

In the spring of 2014, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910. There was great anticipation for this major exhibition of Korean art as it followed two others the previous year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom, 2013–14) and at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (In Grand Style: Celebrations in Korean Art During the Joseon Dynasty, 2013–14). Treasures from Korea will travel from Philadelphia, first to Los Angeles, and then Houston, yet problems of transportation and sensibility to light mean… Full Review