Browse Recent Book Reviews

In the past three decades, there has been a welcome increase in literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American photography. While much pathbreaking scholarship has been produced, art historians have acknowledged only a fraction of black photographers active in the pre–Civil Rights era. Taking the city of Memphis as her case study, Earnestine Lovelle Jenkins contributes a much-needed and richly researched monograph to the history of African American photography. Organized into ten chapters split between three parts, Jenkins’s book covers photographs of black Memphians from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century. Part 1, “Memphis: From Slavery to Freedom,”… Full Review

With this book, one of the more prolific Maya archaeologists makes a significant art historical contribution, providing evidence of the impact of adolescent males in ancient Maya society as preeminent subjects and patrons of art and texts, particularly during the Classic period (300–850 CE). Indeed, according to the author, young males “energized and reinforced courtly societies” of the ancient Maya realm (6). Over six chapters, plus extensive and detailed endnotes, the work fully combines epigraphy, art history, and archaeological data into a comprehensive synthesis that provides a new perspective on gender among the ancient Maya, a topic that until now… Full Review

24 HRS in Photos (2011), an art installation by Dutch photographer, curator, and designer Erik Kessels, gives us a means of looking at the contemporary state of photography. To create it, Kessels printed out every picture uploaded to Flickr, the image-sharing website, on a single day. The resulting mountains of photos reached to the ceiling in one location, poured through doorways in another, and avalanched over furniture in a third. The flood of images makes material the constant production and circulation of digital photographs in our current moment, and it is easy to respond with a sense of fatigue, a… Full Review

The Alhambra has long been an accessible entryway into a powerful kind of Orientalist romanticism, capturing the minds and words of writers, rulers, artists, and art historians alike. Constructed at the end of the ninth century, expanded as a palace in the twelfth and thirteenth under the Nasrid dynasty (1230–1492), before falling into disrepair from the Reconquista until the nineteenth century, the Alhambra inspired Europeans with its arabesque ornamental scheme and poetic Arabic epigraphy. But as Olga Bush points out in Reframing the Alhambra, the records and descriptions from such sources often tell us more about the authors themselves… Full Review

There are times when divergent academic and ideological interests come together unexpectedly; these events can yield new scholarly insights even as they lay bare disciplinary antagonisms. A 2009 symposium at the Clark Art Institute was just such an occasion. Its interrogatory title Is Paris Still the Capital of the 19th Century? signaled the conveners’ interest in the legacies of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and T. J. Clark for the writing of nineteenth-century art history. Less clear was whether the title was meant ironically or in earnest. Were the conveners purposely begging the question? The publication of a related collection of… Full Review

The catalogue Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886) accompanied its namesake exhibition in Istanbul curated by Bahattin Öztuncay, Ahmet Ersoy, and Deniz Türker. The exhibition displayed the Bismarck Gift Albums, three photographic albums prepared by the court of Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) as an official gift for Otto von Bismarck (d. 1890), Germany’s long-term legendary chancellor. These albums (acquired by the Omer M. Koç Collection in May 2017) document the Söğüt Photographic Expedition, which was a trip ordered in 1886 by Abdülhamid II’s imperial decree to the then newly established Ertuğrul Sancak… Full Review

The Dutch painter, printmaker, and draftsman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) died three hundred fifty years ago (the anniversary this year is being marked by exhibitions and events worldwide) and for much of that time, his art has been the object of avid consumption, artistic emulation, and scholarly scrutiny. Responses have ranged from adulation to disgust, but apathy has seldom been one of them. Thus, it is a daunting challenge to say something new about this endlessly fascinating and infuriatingly cagey old master, whose own literary record can be summed up in a handful of financially motivated letters and pithy (possibly… Full Review

The release of Sharon Farmer’s most recent book, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience, was eagerly awaited. With this study, the author tackles an exciting and ambitious project: to reconsider the history of silk industries in medieval Paris and question its origins. Exploiting with ease all sources available, Farmer demonstrates that from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris had, in effect, a silk cloth industry whose production went far beyond the manufacture of haberdashery to which it has often been limited. In the introduction, Farmer addresses and… Full Review

The Sainte-Chapelle de Paris is renowned as a monumental reliquary, designed for King Louis IX (r. 1214–70, canonized 1297), to guard the Crown of Thorns and other Passion relics. Its fame is matched only by praise (then and now) for its dazzling Gothic beauty. Despite its importance, few historians have attempted to understand its design. Meredith Cohen’s book fills this void by offering new insight into its architectural significance. The text is organized into five chapters that analyze the creation, dissemination, and crystallization of an aesthetic associated with Capetian rulership in Paris. She retraces the royal patronage of architecture from… Full Review

Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open is based on the five lectures, collectively titled “Sculpture on the Threshold—An Enquiry into the Underlying Forms of Sculpture,” that Penelope Curtis delivered as the 2015 Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in London. The framework of the lecture series, given biennially since 1994 by selected leading scholars of British art, accounts for the specific national focus of the book, though at times it seems incongruous for a project concerned with identifying something akin to a universal vocabulary of sculpture. Curtis justifies this exact issue in the preface, writing that beyond the… Full Review