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

Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, eds.
Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture.. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press in association with Bard Graduate Center, 2013. 712 pp.; 760 color ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780300196146)
Ambitious and far-reaching, History of Design offers an introductory global history of decorative arts, material culture, and design over the course of six centuries and is the fruit of nearly a decade’s worth of coordination on the part of editors Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, with contributions from twenty-six listed authors. Envisioned as a textbook, its six chapters are clearly arranged in four chronological sections and six geo-cultural areas (currently omitting Australia/Oceania, which the editors note is planned for future editions). Color codes allow readers to pursue the story of individual cultures, skipping others, but the aim of producing an… Full Review
August 7, 2014
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Joseph Shatzmiller
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 202 pp.; 14 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (9780691156996)
In Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace, Joseph Shatzmiller investigates the impact of Christian pictorial and aesthetic traditions on Jewish art in the Middle Ages. Jewish visual responses to styles, images, religious beliefs, cultural values, materials, and texts found in Christian art have previously been examined by Bianca Kühnel, Malachi Beit-Arié, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Bezalel Narkiss, Vivian Mann, and Eva Frojmovic, among others.[1] In addition, a recent exhibition, Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue edited by Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt, explored these themes (… Full Review
August 7, 2014
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Maxwell K. Hearn
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. 208 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300197037)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 11, 2013–April 6, 2014
As Maxwell K. Hearn explains in his introduction to this important book, which serves as the catalogue of an exhibition he curated, for over two millennia ink made from lampblack or pine soot has been the principal medium of the allied arts of painting and calligraphy in China. Ground with water to form a liquid and applied with a brush to paper or silk, ink is an infinitely flexible medium: ranging in tone from jet black to pale, silvery gray, it records every inflection of the artist's arm, hands, and fingers transmitted to the tip of the brush. Ink was… Full Review
August 7, 2014
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Frazer Ward
Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture.. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. 224 pp.; 24 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781611683356)
In No Innocent Bystanders, Frazer Ward addresses issues of community and the public through the lens of canonical performance artists—and work—from the 1970s. Ward is acutely aware of the importance of how an event or action is framed as art, noting that the “importance of art as a context here is that it at once invokes and relies upon (even as it may capture) an audience” (2–3). Ward chooses to focus on seminal pieces—many of which were so controversial that they received coverage in the mainstream press—in order to tease out the implications of audience, publics, and counterpublics in… Full Review
July 31, 2014
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Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner, eds.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 288 pp.; 298 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780262018777)
Though its title coyly pretends to be small, Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha is actually a large, substantial book. Edited and compiled by Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner, Various Small Books provides an illustrated and annotated catalog of artists’ books inspired by Ed Ruscha’s books. It also includes an essay by Mark Rawlinson and descriptive texts by Phil Taylor. Ruscha created a number of books in the 1960s and 1970s that helped to create the field of contemporary artists’ books. Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1962, contains photographs of exactly twenty-six… Full Review
July 31, 2014
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Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis
London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2012. 448 pp.; 225 color ills.; 75 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300187045)
In 1943, the English architect, landscape architect, and town planner Geoffrey Jellicoe designed an exhibition for the British Road Federation (BRF) called Motorways for Britain. Jellicoe included photographs of motorways superimposed on different types of English landscape, showing thousands of miles of roadways “designed to harmonise with typical British scenery,” as described by Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis, authors of the lavishly illustrated and thoroughly researched Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England. They go on to say that a year later the BRF published New Roads for Britain: A Plan for the Immediate Future… Full Review
July 31, 2014
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Ilona Katzew, ed.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011. 320 pp.; 220 color ills. Cloth $70.00 (9780300176643)
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, November 6, 2011–January 29, 2012; Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, July 12—October 7, 2012
Conceived as an “integral counterpart” to the eponymous exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and which also appeared at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World features an impressive roster of international scholars, an interdisciplinary approach, and over two hundred full-color illustrations. The publication is not, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue (there are no individual entries); rather, it is a collection of related essays capable of standing independently of the exhibition it was meant to accompany. In this sense, Contested Visions (the book) is an important example… Full Review
July 24, 2014
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Arne Glimcher, Richard Tuttle, and Richard Tobin
Exh. cat. Taos: Harwood Museum of Art, 2012. 68 pp.; 42 color ills.; 22 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780615572093)
Exhibition schedule: Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, February 25–Sunday, June 17, 2012; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, January 26–May 12, 2013 (under the title Agnes Martin: The New York–Taos Connection [1947–1957]); University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, September 13–December 14, 2013
Agnes Martin: Before the Grid offered a rare opportunity to examine a selection of Martin’s artwork made before the iconic grid paintings she began around 1960. Martin destroyed much of her early work; for her, only the grids successfully embodied the authorial detachment and holistic union of painterly elements she sought in her practice. Despite the obvious curatorial challenges caused by Martin’s acts of destruction, the exhibition’s organizers, Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, presented a visually rich selection of approximately two dozen paintings and works on paper depicting standard modernist genres—a still life, landscapes, portraits, and Surrealist abstractions—as well as… Full Review
July 24, 2014
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James Cahill, Sarah Handler, and Julia M. White
Exh. cat. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2013. 126 pp.; 67 color ills. Cloth $49.50 (9780971939714)
Exhibition schedule: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, September 25–December 22, 2013
Beauty Revealed is the first exhibition dedicated to Chinese paintings of meiren (beautiful women), a subject that is as complex and fraught as the English translation. Consisting of twenty-eight paintings drawn from eleven private and institutional collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe, it explores a genre of painting that appeared during the late Ming and continued in the Qing dynasty (seventeenth-to-late eighteenth century). Organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, Professor Emeritus James Cahill, the exhibition occupies the larger galleries in the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum… Full Review
July 24, 2014
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Dianne Harris
Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture.. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 392 pp.; 133 b/w ills. Paper $39.95 (9780816654567)
As the Great Recession demonstrated, membership in the U.S. middle class is tenuous and perhaps only temporary. Real wages have been declining for decades, but the deceptive practices of Wall Street mortgage brokers leading to the financial collapse of 2008 proved particularly detrimental by stripping more than a million households of the defining badge of middle-class rank, that is, owning a single-family house on a small plot of land. Twelve times as many owed more on their mortgage than their homes were worth in late 2011. This recent painful history has not only crushed families but has undermined faith in… Full Review
July 17, 2014
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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2012. 200 pp.; 82 color ills.; 146 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781934772768)
The “colossal” in the title of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal refers to the size of the monumental objects she examines, as well as to the scale of their production, the range of their reproduction in images and models, and the scope of their reception over time and across the Atlantic Ocean. This book is about big things as much as it is about the broad visual culture of those big things. In six chapters, the reader travels from Egypt to France to the United States and Panama… Full Review
July 17, 2014
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Susan Davidson, Megan Fontanella, Brandon Taylor, and Jeffrey Warda
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2013. 144 pp.; 124 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780892074976)
Exhibition schedule: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 26–September 8, 2013; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014
Robert Motherwell: Early Collages gathered the artist’s most important works in that medium from 1943 through 1951. Expertly directed by Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim, New York, the exhibition included many pieces that had not been shown publicly for decades and demonstrated the pivotal role that collage played in Motherwell’s early career. The artist was unique among those of his generation in creating important collages throughout his life. The first impression yielded by the exhibition was Motherwell’s immediate and intense identification with the medium as well as his willingness to experiment in it. For instance, Joy… Full Review
July 17, 2014
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Emma Lavigne, ed.
Exh. cat. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2013. 256 pp.; 800 color ills. Cloth €39.00 (9782844266217)
Exhibition schedule: Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 25, 2013–January 6, 2014; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, April 11–July 13, 2014; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, November 23, 2014–March 8, 2015
Upon entering Pierre Huyghe’s extraordinary retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Emma Lavigne, the visitor encounters a tall, abstract, concrete sculpture covered with marks of time and material deterioration. The sculpture, titled Mère Anatolica 1, is not by Huyghe but by Parvine Curie, who produced it in 1975 as part of an event at the College Pierre de Coubertin de Chevreuse, a junior high school that Huyghe attended. Huyghe moved the sculpture from its outside location at the school into the enclosed south gallery of the Pompidou. In the background the visitor hears sound extracts from one day… Full Review
July 10, 2014
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Exhibition schedule: Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, January 25–May 12, 2013
A gray day is a good day to visit the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Against the museum’s cast concrete walls, natural lighting, and textured cement surfaces, Still’s paintings give off a luminous glow that recalls the artist’s own statement, “You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire” (Clyfford Still, letter to Betty Freeman, December 14, 1960; Betty Freeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). As a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Still’s influence has without question helped define the history of abstract painting. The exhibition Red, Yellow, Blue (and Black and White)… Full Review
July 10, 2014
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Mark P. McDonald
Exh. cat. London: British Museum and Lund Humphries, 2012. 320 pp.; 350 color ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780714126807)
Exhibition schedule: British Museum, London, September 20, 2012–January 6, 2013; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 20–June 16, 2013 (under the title Spanish Drawings from the British Museum: Renaissance to Goya); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, August 31–November 24, 2013; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, December 14, 2013–March 9, 2014
For more than fifty years, studies of Spanish art have disproved the myth that peninsular artists did not draw. While some Spaniards drew very little—most notably El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez—others drew a great deal. Francisco de Goya, for example, was a remarkably prolific draftsman. Nevertheless, curators and historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to assume that the scarcity of Spanish drawings in European collections compared to those by Italian or Dutch Old Masters evinced a national dislike for draftsmanship or, worse yet, an essential Spanish passion that did not lend itself to disegno… Full Review
July 3, 2014
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