Browse Recent Book Reviews

Tastemakers, Collectors and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth-Century is an ambitious undertaking: a collection of a dozen contributions, including the introduction. Best described as a collection of case studies with each essay dedicated to a single collector or coherent group of collectors, this volume stands out for the ways in which it does not engage in much conjecture about why a person made a particular artistic decision. Often books dedicated to the history of collecting art in the United States—whether early contributions like Aline Saarien’s The Proud Possessors (1958) and Lilian B. Miller’s Patrons and Patriotism (1966)… Full Review

Editor’s Note: Following author Sarah Lewis’s decision to decapitalize the word "black,” this review retains the lowercase when referring to the racial category/ethnic group.                                                                  ********** In A Companion to American Art, published by Blackwell in 2015, I surveyed how scholars of American art had been approaching the critical study of race and visual representation since the late twentieth century. At the time, those approaches included either foregrounding or decentering race in interpretations of the work of black artists; speaking about race in relation to a broader range of (especially white-produced) artistic production; and even imagining “post-racial” art and art… Full Review

Few images, if any, are as iconic—even synecdochic—of life, culture, and politics in Renaissance Venice than Jacopo de’ Barbari’s monumental View of Venice. The Italian artist’s six-sheet woodblock print showcasing a bird’s-eye-view of the city and its lagoon was produced circa 1497–1500 with the support of the German publisher Anton Kolb. It stood as the largest print produced in Europe at the time (1.35 × 2.75 meters) whose magnitude and inventiveness were recognized by the Venetian government’s granting to Kolb of one of the earliest known copyright permissions for a printed image. Marveled by commentators since its inception for… Full Review

In Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, Gloria Jane Bell considers Indigenous cultural belongings held in Vatican Museums collections. As she turns attention to the stories they tell—and the Vatican’s efforts to silence them—she locates these possessions within a long history of Indigenous travelers with creative ties to Rome. The book traces these ties through discussions of prominent Indigenous artists, stolen Indigenous artworks, and the mobile, tenacious sovereignty they have maintained in the face of papal dominance. Bridging multiple disciplines including art history, material studies, and archival studies, Eternal Sovereigns suggests a “new, entangled, and unsettling”… Full Review

The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, by Irene V. Small, has the ambition and potential to become a classic. Its starting point is the inflection forged by the work of Lygia Clark on the history of modernism, and its guiding thread is the discovery of the “organic line” in the mid-1950s. This line, which appears wherever two monochromatic planes juxtaposed on the same surface meet, transforms void into breath. Its discovery opened a whole realm of artistic possibilities, which Clark unfolded in her extensive experimentations. What this book explores are the countless reverberations of this organic line. … Full Review

In Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, Kency Cornejo surveys contemporary political art in Central American countries. The book includes analyses of forty artists and more than eighty works, underscoring the abundance and diversity of artistic experimentation in the region. The author reads these pieces through her concept of “visual disobedience,” a decolonial mode of resistance that posits art as a direct intervention in a specific sociopolitical reality. For Cornejo, these works embody a sensorial practice where the tactile, auditory, and visual coexist and are fundamentally motivated by love for the “damnés,”—the condemned, as put… Full Review

The intriguing title of Isabelle Tillerot’s monograph both piques curiosity and encapsulates the thesis that its text develops in detail. Deploying astute observations and subtle insight, this study follows the evolution of room decoration in seventeenth and eighteenth-century European, principally French royal and aristocratic dwellings. Its focus is on the close relationship between the ornamental designs of these spaces and the paintings embedded within them, projects that required the joint efforts of artists and artisans of varied specializations and status. Ultimately it asserts that the full flowering of rocaille—the author rejects the nineteenth-century term “rococo”—decor coincides with the adoption of… Full Review

Joining a growing number of publications that have sought to reexamine China’s socialist legacy, two new books examine the ways in which contemporary art practice and discourse reengaged the social and political commitments of the Maoist period (1949–76). Jennifer Lee’s Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 focuses on the roughly eight years immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to examine how artists and intellectuals reconfigured socialist aesthetics for the post-Mao era. In The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China, Chang Tan looks to a later moment in the 1990s and early 2000s… Full Review

Michele Matteini’s The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China offers insight on the eighteenth-century artist Luo Ping’s (1733­–1799) position in the history of painting in China and sheds light on the intricate relationship between artist and patron. Known as one of the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou,” Luo is primarily recognized for his unusual paintings of ghosts and his activities in the commercial city of Yangzhou. Luo Ping was introduced to audiences in Europe and the US through a 2009 exhibition that traveled between Museum Rietberg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and… Full Review

Sartorial Japonisme and the Experience of Kimonos in Britain, 1865—1914, explores the experience of kimono in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Through the medium of painting, theatre, performance, dress, department stores, postcards, and drag, it examines the design, construction, dissemination, and reception of kimono as garments situated as a sartorial medium in the critical discourse of Japonisme. Approaching kimono as a unique space of transformation, the book includes the everyday experiences of kimono in Britain and of those people and spaces previously ignored or overlooked. Researched and written by Arisa Yamaguchi, assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba, it draws… Full Review