Recently Published Reviews

El Greco’s Italian years, on which Andrew W. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy centers, present scholars with a challenge. Next to no documentation survives for the ten years he spent there. He seems to have received no major commission, the number of works is small, and none are securely dated. Most of El Greco’s Italian paintings have religious subjects, and Casper utilizes this fact to bring order to the material. According to Casper, one of the central artistic problems of the late sixteenth century Counter Reformation was the anxiety that images might be confused… Full Review

Reading An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body by Hans Belting has been remarkably similar to my experiences recording a performance as an art event in western Africa. The handsome book itself, like the African festival, is relatively short. Yet both the book and the ceremony are packed with layers of complex discourse, and become meaningful only when examined within the context of a particular intellectual tradition. Both require interpreters and the occasional suspension of disbelief. As a scholar based in the United States, I have been invited to observe ceremonial displays in Côte d’Ivoire because the participants wished to… Full Review

The central portion of Horst Bredekamp's Theorie des Bildakts ("Theory of the Image-Act") closes with the verbal image of Aby Warburg as the figurehead of a ship, "gaze locked in apotropaic contact with the waves of destruction," alone in propounding the "irritating life" possessed by forms of all sorts (305–6). Warburg’s dictum, "Du lebst und thust mir nichts" (“You live and do nothing to me”), is the implicit epigram to Bredekamp's enterprise—given that Bredekamp frames Warburg’s declaration as more trepidatious adjuration than confident assertion (21–22).[1] Bredekamp maintains that Warburg's thinking about art, craft, vision, and culture "approached more… Full Review

Last year the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel co-organized the provocative exhibition Jordaens and the Antique and published the accompanying catalogue under review here. Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) has long been relegated to a distant third position in the pantheon of seventeenth-century Flemish painters, behind Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Nonetheless, Jordaens outlived both Rubens and Van Dyck by twenty-five years and, as a result, became perhaps the leading Flemish painter for a quarter of a century. Despite achieving considerable fame in his lifetime, Jordaens has remained a bit of a shadow… Full Review

“Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other, the spectator,” wrote Marcel Duchamp in 1957 (quoted in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959, 77). Unwearyingly, Duchamp stressed the contribution of the spectator to the “creative act.” Like him, Juliane Rebentisch argues in Aesthetics of Installation Art that works of art exist only in the aesthetic experience of artists and spectators, shared in art discourse. But while her book centers on the relationship between subject and object—and therewith aims to overcome… Full Review

Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, both by T. J. Demos, are books of exceptional merit and importance. Demos’s critical practice resonates with a line from Jacques Derrida that has always inspired and haunted me: “I believe in the political virtue of the contretemps” (1993; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994, 88). In these two works, Demos has offered not merely a body of… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews What a long way caa.reviews has come in fifteen years. The journal has published nearly twenty-four hundred reviews since 1998, more than four hundred of them in the broad category known as Renaissance/Baroque Art, which includes the more specific designation Early Modern Southern European Art, among others. One great achievement of caa.reviews is that it records the changing ways in which scholars approach their fields. The second installment of “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections” is “Reflections on Early Modern Southern European Art” by Pamela M. Jones (University of Massachusetts Boston), and it follows upon… Full Review

For many philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, the philosophy of film stands to film just as the philosophy of language stands to language: a given range of familiar phenomena are embedded in our lives in ways that take for granted a certain understanding of their nature, and the philosopher interrogates that understanding with a view to disclosing and testing the legitimacy of its presuppositions, and thereby clarifying the true nature of those phenomena. Katherine Thomson-Jones’s short, accessible book, Aesthetics and Film, belongs to this genre: it introduces readers to the field by focusing on two clusters of… Full Review

Not too many years ago, the story of American art as characterized in survey courses and other summary narratives was told in an apologetic tone. How could one make a case for the importance or singularity of a nation’s output before there was a nation and in the face of a European model then characterized as a teleological progression of ever-increasing artistic greatness? John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) story was frequently presented as the pinnacle of colonial uncertainty and inferiority. His output was cast as British art but lesser; the epistolary reviews from Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West of A… Full Review

At the most superficial level, Edward Hopper’s paintings represent modern American life as a series of moments oscillating along a continuum between solitude and desolation via loneliness, isolation, and alienation and back again. As the drawings, paintings, prints, and ephemera included in Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) attest, those oscillations can generate a curious sense of longing that endures well after one departs the gallery spaces. The exhibition, a version of which opened at the Whitney Museum of Art in May 2013, features a small portion of the 2,500 drawings included in the… Full Review

Twenty-first-century media is marked by the rise of social networks and the concomitant tools to analyze and manipulate the data produced and transmitted through those networks. The work of R. Luke DuBois has emerged within this milieu, and his explorations of mass media and popular culture amid a world of unprecedented shared cultural production and exponentially proliferating data have provided a rich body of work over a relatively short period of time. In a span of just over a decade, DuBois has produced an abundant and varied oeuvre, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has gathered that… Full Review

In The Echo of Things, Christopher Wright analyzes photographs of an island off New Georgia in the western Solomon Islands that were taken by European visitors at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. He also examines contemporary Solomon Islander attitudes toward old photographs and photography in general. This is an exciting approach, informed by Wright’s concern with history, ethnography, photography, and responses of the people of Roviana Island, a small but central site in the colonial histories of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. A historian, anthropologist, archivist, and historian of photography, Wright visited Roviana… Full Review

This edited volume—a companion to the exhibition of the same name, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), in association with the Sicilian Region and the Assessorato for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity—showcases the art, archaeology, history, and culture of the Greek cities on Sicily from the victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE to the defeat of Syracuse in 212 BCE by the Roman general Marcellus. The book’s objective, explained in the forewords by Italian officials, the editors, and museum personnel, and in the introduction by Claire… Full Review

In the section of Lives of the Artists dedicated to Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari tells a bewildering story surrounding the Doni Tondo (ca. 1506). Agnolo Doni, a friend of Michelangelo and lover of all things beautiful, had commissioned the painting and had negotiated with the artist on a price of seventy scudi. We do not know whether this price included the frame, or the gold and blue and other raw materials as would have been normal at the time, but when Agnolo received the finished work, he decided to pay only forty scudi. Again Vasari omits the reasons why… Full Review

In Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, André Dombrowski presents an unfamiliar Paul Cézanne: the seemingly awkward, overwrought romantic who produced such works as The Murder (ca. 1868–70) and The Strangled Woman (ca. 1870–72). When this “expressionistic” Cézanne has been attended to at all, he has been characterized as an artist subject to his own immature psychic turbulence—a radically different creature from the modernist master whose influential “constructivist stroke” emerged in the mid-to-late 1870s. Dombrowski sets out to correct this dismissive periodization, making a case for the relevance of Cézanne’s early career. Devoting each of his five chapters to sustained… Full Review