Browse Recent Book Reviews

In 2016 the Tate Modern and International Film Festival Rotterdam presented Throwing Shadows: Japanese Expanded Cinema in the Time of Pop, a series of screenings and events accompanied by a symposium. The program included restagings of live cinema performances by Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver, Rikuro Miyai, and Jun’ichi Okuyama decades after their original inception and, for the first time, for audiences in the UK. Unlike extant single-screen works of experimental film, expanded cinema and intermedia often involves multiple projection sources and multiple surfaces upon which images are projected, and typically includes live, performative elements that respond in real time to… Full Review

The three books reviewed here represent recent monographs on dress and textiles and their movements along the Silk Roads in the medieval and early modern periods. The study of dress and textiles has often been marginalized in art history, and the materials dismissed as minor or decorative arts—a marginality that is compounded by the limited survival of textiles and garments from earlier historical periods, which sometimes remain only as reused scraps. Textiles have been recognized as evidence for the exchange of ideas and technologies across Eurasia, as markers of trade, cultural contact, and interaction, but far less frequently as visual-culture… Full Review

At the end of Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy, Lei Xue describes seeing boulders that had been hauled out of the muddy waters of the Yangtze River at the island of Jiaoshan in modern-day Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province. This highly publicized and costly expedition was meant to salvage the remaining fragments of the famous Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming, hereafter Eulogy) stone inscription dated to 514 CE that had partially collapsed into the river. In the eleventh century, the inscription was only visible in the wintry months when the water… Full Review

How did artists in Syria develop Arab modernist painting and aesthetic philosophies at the start of a century characterized by warfare and in the midst of the violent imposition of borders by colonial powers, the displacement of people, and the assignment of new identities? Anneka Lenssen’s Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria explores the question of modern art’s place in this turbulent era. The book is an authoritative study of the emergence of modernist art in the context of contemporary politics and territorial contestations in Syria, spanning from the last years of the Ottoman Empire through 1965… Full Review

In a rapidly growing canon of scholarship on food in art, Marni Reva Kessler adds her personal voice and unique approach to the subject in Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art. In four chapters on depictions of fish, butter, fruit, and ham by French artists Édouard Manet, Antoine Vollon, Gustave Caillebotte, and Edgar Degas, Kessler purposefully chooses not to focus on the food’s delicious and mouthwatering qualities—a striking choice, given France’s reputation for culinary excellence. Rather, Kessler analyzes unsettling pictures of fish postmortem, stabbed butter, and discarded meats that dismantle popular understandings of food pictures… Full Review

The role of a bodhisattva in Buddhism has often been compared to that of a saint in Catholicism: an intimate and approachable divine figure who would be willing to put their own enlightenment on pause in order to ensure the salvation of all sentient beings. Among all, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin in Chinese), known as the Goddess of Compassion in English, has an outsize role in East Asian Buddhism. While she is ubiquitous in Chinese art, the Goddess of Compassion is woefully underrepresented in scholarly works, which focus mainly on imperially sponsored icons and primarily from the perspective of elite… Full Review

Readers may know Michèle Hannoosh best from her work on the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. Alerted to error-riddled versions of his famous Journal (while researching her landmark Painting and the “Journal” of Delacroix, Princeton University Press, 1995), Hannoosh returned to its sources. In her two-volume critical edition of the Journal (José Corti, 2009) and associated publications, Hannoosh brought to light a vast array of new material and ordered a labyrinth of cross-references. In Jules Michelet, Hannoosh focuses on an inaugural specialist in what Michel Foucault called “history itself” (L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, 1969, 13). Two… Full Review

Like the Rococo style his work came to epitomize, the artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s life was seemingly unpredictable, liberated, and characterized by constant change. Fragonard (1732–1806) began his career by winning the coveted Prix de Rome, and in 1761 he presented an ambitious history painting as his reception piece to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The painting placed the young artist in high ranking within the elite establishment, but after such success he unexpectedly turned away from public life as an academic painter, prioritizing instead inconsistent commissions from private clients and working in artistic styles that the Académie… Full Review

(An open-access version of this book is available at OAPEN: Open Access Publishing in European Networks.) Early in her important account of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, arguably the most significant critic-artist partnership to emerge in postcolonial India, Saloni Mathur characterizes her work as “an ongoing intellectual debt” (xii). The debt may be hers, but it is conveniently shared by everyone working on the history of twentieth-century art and criticism. Building on extended conversations and sustained archival research, Mathur considers Kapur’s writings between the years 1968, when she drafted In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in… Full Review

Historically defined by the hypermasculinity of the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration, political contestation, and scientific observation, Antarctica today represents a critical multidisciplinary meeting point. Polly Gould’s Antarctica, Art and Archive offers a timely contribution to the historical study of Antarctica and indicates the refractive interplay among visual media, temporalities, and histories. Gould is both author and artist, and her archival study of the work of Edward A. Wilson and the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 is presented in conversation with her own artistic practice. Taken as a whole, the book brings together a complex series of interrelated histories, materials… Full Review