Recently Published Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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