Browse Recent Book Reviews

Amelia Rauser’s book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s traces the transformation of the iconic robe à la grecque (or Empire line dress) from a fanciful, archaeologically inspired costume to an international, semantically fraught fashion trend in the last turbulent decade of the eighteenth century. Her erudite, engaging new study presents the reader with an impressively interdisciplinary analysis of this cultural phenomenon, which she sees as closely interwoven with contemporary debates on sensory perception, the emotions, race, and the role of women in modern society. Her approach, combining an intellectual history of the… Full Review

For centuries, Bologna’s determinedly local self-consciousness of its art and architecture has been inscribed in the archival and published record. This mentality becomes methodology in the writings of Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who relied on documents for his Felsina pittrice, or Lives of the Bolognese Painters, published in 1678. An efficient tour of the Bolognese archival record and such attendant publications introduces this slim volume of six essays based on presentations at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in 2016. Today, scholars of Emilian art refer often to the writings of Antonio di Paolo Masini, Giovanni… Full Review

An accessible and timely book on art history’s history is a gap that needed to be filled, but the title of this book by Christopher S. Wood, a professor in the German department at New York University, is somewhat misleading. This book goes well beyond a history of art history, or even a historiography of the field, as several reviewers have noted. Andrei Pop, for example, calls it “more than a textbook” and rather a “polemic” with art history; Cindy Helms argues that it is “a heavy duty assessment of what the discipline of Art History has thought about itself… Full Review

Few academic disciplines are as variously housed in institutions of higher learning as architectural history—sometimes in university departments of history or art history, sometimes in schools of architecture or degree programs in historic preservation or heritage conservation, and sometimes in several different places within the same institution. Should the discipline be devoted to the training of architects or to fostering a new generation of architectural historians based in methods of nontextual analysis? Since the early nineteenth century, the history of architecture has been taught to future architects—the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, had a professor of architectural history—and by the end… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. If you had the chance to write to President Donald Trump, what would you say? Across three presidencies, Sheryl Oring has been typing postcards from citizens on a vintage typewriter, expressing the people’s thoughts about those in power. Read more in Christianna Fail’s review of Activating Democracy: The “I Wish to Say” Project. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. In a review befitting the eve of the 2020 US presidential election, Ariel Evans discusses the eerily prescient book and exhibition Kathryn Andrews: Run for President, exploring presidential publicity and the roots of Trumpism. Full Review

Meha Priyadarshini’s Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico is structured as a spatial-commercial journey, presenting a “typical biography” (sensu Igor Kopytoff in his classic 1986 essay from Cambridge University Press’s The Social Life of Things) of the world’s first “global brand” (to use Craig Clunas’s oft-cited phrase). The book follows Chinese porcelain from production in Jingdezhen, to transpacific shipping from Manila, to consumption in Acapulco and Mexico City, and finally to reproduction in Puebla (one valley east of the viceregal capital), where Chinese porcelain inspired a local off-brand (talavera poblana) that was valued on its own terms by… Full Review

Over the past three decades, scholarship on the history of photography in Africa has done much to overturn monolithic accounts of modernity in the discipline of art history. Today African photography is a common topic of art history PhD dissertations and the regular focus of major books and exhibitions. The significance of this development cannot be overstated. Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa by Jennifer Bajorek can be understood as an important turning point in these developments because it moves beyond topics that are by now familiar, even canonical. Grounded in rigorous theoretical inquiry and years of in-depth… Full Review

In Aquatint Worlds, Douglas Fordham argues that the medium of aquatint, a type of tonal printmaking, unified an aesthetic for picturing travel, in particular the architecture, peoples, and landscapes that came into view with the expansion of the British empire. This is a global and material history and a critical intervention in the history of print. From William Ivins’s description of engraved lines as a “net of rationality” to John Berger’s contemplation of “ways of seeing” art through reproduction, theorists have argued that technologies of print condition the reception of images. Fordham posits that aquatint was one such “worldmaking”… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This autumn, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week we revisit a crucial volume published in 2019, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, as reviewed by Michele Valerie Ronnick. Full Review