Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk, eds.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 342 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth € 119.00 (9789462989085)
This volume, featuring nine essays and an extensive introduction by its editors, stems from scholarly discussions hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Written by a multidisciplinary group of established scholars affiliated with universities across the United States and Canada, this book attempts to shift the scholarly debate about postclassical Rome from the concepts of decline and renewal to those of continuity, adaptation, reuse, reconstruction, memory, and (creative) resilience—a concept highlighted in the introduction (25–26). In this endeavor, the volume is successful and should be of interest to those engaged with… Full Review
March 1, 2023
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Michelangelo Sabatino and Ben Nicholson, eds.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 408 pp.; 22 color ills.; 160 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9781517903145)
The typical monographic treatment of a building or a community begins with a discussion of the patron’s plan and then traces the construction and development of the site to completion. In some cases, the history of the building or community is traced through subsequent changes and adaptations, concluding with its present state—or its destruction. This book takes a somewhat different course, as it starts with the founding of a utopian community in 1814 by George Rapp and  a group of disaffected Lutherans from Württemberg in Germany who applied the name New Harmony (after their earlier Pennsylvania settlement) to their new… Full Review
February 27, 2023
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Angela Vanhaelen
Penn State University Press, 2022. 236 pp.; 14 color ills.; 47 b/w ills. Cloth $114.95 (9780271091402)
The artful protagonists of The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam are witty enchantments, products of active imaginations whose disappearance requires further imaginative action. Angela Vanhaelen brings to life the Amsterdam doolhoven, labyrinths attached to an array of entertaining displays that sprang up in the prosperous Dutch city beginning in the seventeenth century. This unprecedented study of a phenomenon unique to Amsterdam reveals a landscape of innovation, foreign-sourced artisanal knowledge, and moral edification pivoting around unexpected sites: early modern amusement parks that, along with taverns and inns, functioned as spaces for a cosmopolitan range of visitors to encounter astonishing works… Full Review
February 13, 2023
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Monica Bravo
New Haven: Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 256 pp.; 110 color ills.; 33 b/w ills.; 143 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300253634)
The past two decades have seen an explosion of interest in early twentieth-century Mexican visual culture and especially in photography, which has been the subject of a number of important books which include Esther Gabara’s Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), Roberto Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Andrea Nobile’s Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2010). Other recent books include discussions of photography in a larger context that also includes painting, design, and literature, such as Tatiana Flores’s… Full Review
February 6, 2023
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Mark Antliff
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. 284 pp.; 10 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780271089454)
In 2023 the political nature of sculpture barely needs stating. Over the past two decades, the toppling of statues has become a nexus between state-sanctioned violence and defiance against its monuments. Yet there has been little reflection on sculpture’s capacity to counter social injustices. In this context, Mark Antliff’s exploration of sculptors’ connections to anarchism between 1908 and 1914 is timely, even if the specificity of this moment of reflection is left unspoken. Antliff’s history of the cultural politics of London and Paris looks beyond painters’ and graphic artists’ anarchist credentials, well-established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… Full Review
January 25, 2023
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Antonia Fondaras
Series: Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, Volume: 308/42. Brill, 2020. 370 pp.; 60 color ills. Hardback € 143.00 (9789004401143)
Presiding majestically over a large and often lively piazza in Florence’s Oltrarno neighborhood, the Basilica di Santo Spirito is one of the most harmonious of all the city’s churches. The early Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi designed it for a community of Augustinian Hermits and, even though the church remained unfinished at his death in 1446 and was completed not entirely to his specifications thereafter, it bears his strong imprint. Recalling early Christian basilicas, the Latin-cross church has a flat-roofed nave supported by Corinthian columns that spring from rounded arches. The creamy white intonaco walls are minimally articulated with pietra serena… Full Review
January 11, 2023
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Claire Grace
Cambridge, MA: October Books, 2022. 432 pp.; 29 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (9780262543521)
In the 1980s, New York City was marked by a series of crises including the AIDS epidemic, gentrification, crumbling infrastructure, and the ascent of neoliberal politicians whose attacks social welfare made the compound emergency faced by residents of the city all the more dire. This complex of social and economic devastation emerged with renewed skepticism about the artist’s capacity to disturb prevailing power structures alongside an interrogation of the role of art making in relation to more conventional types of activism. As Gran Fury put it in a 1988 poster advertising The Kitchen’s winter performance program, when it came to… Full Review
January 4, 2023
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Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 240 pp.; 193 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780691206103)
Among recent contributions to Piranesi studies, Piranesi Unbound occupies a special place as a volume clearly aligned with the “material turn" of art history. The coauthors, experts on architectural drawings and prints, are implicitly and productively critical of the canonical type of art historical research, concentrating specifically on what classical art history has regarded as parerga—the technical, material, and economic aspects of artistic production. Utilizing variegated forms of writing, Yerkes and Minor draw the reader into the experience of a close study of individual material objects. From one chapter to the next, the narrative is liable to be interrupted… Full Review
December 14, 2022
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Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 806 pp.; 1066 color ills.; 172 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780884024699)
Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 512 pp.; 25 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780884024705)
In pre-Columbian art history, the Andes and Mesoamerica command almost all the scholarly attention. These more heavily studied geographical zones are outnumbered by the neglected ones—the Antilles, Isthmo-Colombia, and Amazonia-Orinokia, or AIAO for short. Is it simply the absence of monumental ruins, as some have suggested, that causes art historians especially to relegate these regions to the margins or is it the relative lack of archaeology on which we can rely? In fact, archaeologists have been excavating and accumulating data in these areas for well over a century and, over that period, some parts of the AIAO were not as… Full Review
December 7, 2022
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Stephen Houston, ed.
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 192 pp.; 67 color ills.; 49 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781606067444)
From the 1940s until the 1990s, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, all major and most minor archaeological sites from the Maya culture were plundered to meet the demands of the international art market. To name a few examples, Richard E. W. Adams recounts that starting in 1976 the deep jungle Maya city of Río Azul was targeted by an intense looting operation that eventually employed up to eighty diggers (Río Azul: An Ancient Maya City, 1999, 5). Von Euw and Graham recorded that in 1975, more than fifty looters trenches were dug at the site of… Full Review
November 30, 2022
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