- Chronology
- Before 1500 BCE
- 1500 BCE to 500 BCE
- 500 BCE to 500 CE
- Sixth to Tenth Century
- Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
- Fifteenth Century
- Sixteenth Century
- Seventeenth Century
- Eighteenth Century
- Nineteenth Century
- Twentieth Century
- Twenty-first Century
- Geographic Area
- Africa
- Caribbean
- Central America
- Central and North Asia
- East Asia
- North America
- Northern Europe
- Oceania/Australia
- South America
- South Asia/South East Asia
- Southern Europe and Mediterranean
- West Asia
- Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice
- Aesthetics
- African American/African Diaspora
- Ancient Egyptian/Near Eastern Art
- Ancient Greek/Roman Art
- Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation
- Art Education/Pedagogy/Art Therapy
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Artistic Practice/Creativity
- Asian American/Asian Diaspora
- Ceramics/Metals/Fiber Arts/Glass
- Colonial and Modern Latin America
- Comparative
- Conceptual Art
- Decorative Arts
- Design History
- Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media
- Digital Scholarship/History
- Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice
- Fiber Arts and Textiles
- Film/Video/Animation
- Folk Art/Vernacular Art
- Genders/Sexualities/Feminisms
- Graphic/Industrial/Object Design
- Indigenous Peoples
- Installation/Environmental Art
- Islamic Art
- Latinx
- Material Culture
- Multimedia/Intermedia
- Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration
- Native American/First Nations
- Painting
- Patronage, Art Collecting
- Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice
- Photography
- Politics/Economics
- Queer/Gay Art
- Race/Ethnicity
- Religion/Cosmology/Spirituality
- Sculpture
- Sound Art
- Survey
- Theory/Historiography/Methodology
- Visual Studies
Browse Recent Book Reviews
Stephanie C. Leone’s The Pamphilj and the Arts brings together sixteen essays examining the biography of Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730), as well as his and his family’s patronage of the visual arts and music. The papers were first assembled for a conference on the Pamphilj and the arts held at Boston College in 2010. The combined expertise of the interdisciplinary scholars assembled by Leone (art historians, musicologists, historians, philologists, linguists, and archivists) reveals a vivid portrait of Pamphilj, whose biography and patronage have been neglected since Lina Montalto’s Un mecenate in Roma barocca: il cardinale Benedetto Pamphilj (Florence: Sansoni, 1955)…
Full Review
March 13, 2014
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), home to a sizeable part of the Paul Mellon Collection of Sporting Art and the largest permanent display of British sporting art in the world, provides an ideal venue for a show dedicated to the presentation of sporting prints. While there have been recent exhibitions on sporting painting and sculpture, including Country Pursuits at VMFA in 2007, this is the first large-scale exhibition on prints outside of galleries and auction houses. Accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, the exhibition endeavors to locate this genre within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artistic…
Full Review
March 7, 2014
When the French daily Libération published its November 14, 2013, print edition “sans photo,” marking photography’s absence with empty white fields, did its public, as it read that day’s “paper,” take note? Or did it encounter this smart protest against the decline of the photojournalist’s profession as a meme, liking and sharing it on smartphone screens? Did Libération strip its website and app edition of photographs too? Such questions are not easy to answer in retrospect, as homepages do not appear to be archived, and who, if anyone, loaded a screenshot onto a blog? The state of photojournalism in the…
Full Review
March 7, 2014
In his latest publication, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, Hugh Belsey highlights the spirited independence and skillful professional maneuvering of the artist he has researched for most of his career. More specifically, Belsey points out how Thomas Gainsborough’s attitudes and decisions, especially in relation to his rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the Royal Academy, clarify the creation of the celebrated Cottage Door (ca. 1780) painting in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and two subsequent similar versions. Indeed, the book coincides with the exhibition of all three canvases together for…
Full Review
February 27, 2014
With the publication in 1778 of A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, antiquarian, writer, and ordained Jesuit priest Thomas West (1720?–1779) contributed to and capitalized on the growing interest in exploring the aesthetic significance of British landscape. The first edition was a success, but West died before seeing the book go into a second, which was expanded and made “decently perspicuous and correct” by the writer William Cockin (1736–1801) (reprinted in 4th ed., London: W. Richardson, 1789, 90). Despite the Guide’s initial success, Cockin included in the preface a curiously belittling description of the…
Full Review
February 27, 2014
Within modern East Asian art and visual culture the politics of beauty have revolved around two notable archetypes: the “Modern Woman” and the “Traditional Woman.” The Modern Woman—also known as the “modern girl” or “new woman”—was identifiable by her bobbed haircut and flapper dress and embodied the flamboyant lifestyle of the self-motivated working girl. The Modern Woman challenged social mores by publicly asserting her sexuality, intelligence, and individualism. In contrast, the Traditional Woman, or “good wife, wise mother,” was based on a Confucian model of womanhood in which moral education and homemaking skills, rather than wage employment, cultural and intellectual…
Full Review
February 27, 2014
By rights, a book about temporary Georgian festival architecture should be the very definition of scholarly navel-gazing. But in our modern era of tablescapes, wall treatments, chalk art, digital holograms, and laser light shows, this illuminating survey of eighteenth-century event planning feels perversely contemporary—as relevant as it is revelatory.
In Georgian England, extravagant decorative and architectural effects were employed for large-scale public displays and elite private entertainments alike. Frequently, these one-off installations celebrated momentous events such as military victories and royal birthdays. “All these decorations were in their time an integral part of a culture rich in visual…
Full Review
February 21, 2014
In 2013, the names of Malian portrait photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé may be familiar to the art-viewing public in Europe and the United States, but this was not always the case. In fact, it was a little over twenty years ago that Keita’s studio portraits were first shown in the United States in the Museum for African Art’s exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991). The timing of that appearance coincided with significant intellectual shifts taking place in the study of African art, and subsequently the field of African photography grew as an area of scholarly pursuit…
Full Review
February 21, 2014
Social media networks like Facebook make us anticipate the moment we turn into objects under another person’s gaze. Yet this experience of becoming a spectacle, and organizing our lives accordingly, is hardly new. Nor is the very small size that our portraits will usually take in these types of media: as Hanneke Grootenboer points out in Treasuring the Gaze, the format of a photo on a smartphone screen is remarkably similar to that of the pre-photographic portrait miniature. In her new book, Grootenboer focuses on a short-lived subgenre of the portrait miniature, the so-called eye miniature or eye portrait…
Full Review
February 21, 2014
Sharon Gregory’s Vasari and the Renaissance Print lays out in orderly fashion the story of prints as told by, and used by, Giorgio Vasari. The strength of the book is its wide-ranging inclusion of all types of print interactions, along with a catalogue of prints mentioned in the Lives. Acknowledging her debt (8) to Patricia Rubin’s landmark book, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Gregory focuses attention on Vasari’s inclusion in his second edition (1568) of a history of printmaking embedded in the life of Marcantonio Raimondi. She carefully traces Vasari’s mentions of prints…
Full Review
February 13, 2014
Load More