Browse Recent Book Reviews

Christina Normore’s first book gracefully crosses disciplines in its examination of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art. A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet encompasses performance, so-called “decorative” arts, book illumination, painting, and literature. Normore posits the feast as a major artistic form that has much to reveal about culture. Which culture, may one ask? The attractive book title does not reflect Normore’s real focus, which is the theatrical productions commissioned by the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good for his famous Feast of the Pheasant staged in his palace in Lille in 1454. The purpose of… Full Review

With the recent publication of two thoughtful and provocative monographs in rapid succession, Ömür Harmanşah has emerged as one of the ancient Near East’s most theoretically aware and intellectually ambitious scholars of art history and archaeology. Tapping into a wealth of cultural criticism and social theory concerning space and place, Harmanşah weaves this literature into case studies drawn from the second and first millennium BCE in ancient Anatolia and surrounding regions. In his first monograph, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (henceforth Cities), the subject is a comparative analysis of the urban character of… Full Review

We should “work the ‘mirror with a memory,’” the photographer Minor White once said about photographic practice, as if the camera were “a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor” (Minor White, “The Light Sensitive Mirage,” 1958, in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, 396). In the second volume of her wide-ranging study, The Deaths of Photography, whose title echoes that of the homage Jacques Derrida wrote after the death of his friend Roland Barthes, the photography theorist Katharina Sykora explores this… Full Review

Irene V. Small’s Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame and Elena Shtromberg’s Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s offer complementary perspectives on the postwar Brazilian avant-garde. At first, they have much in common, with key terms such as “art as social system,” “art as language,” “art as communication,” and “art and politics.” Both also propose a new social-art history, which posits the artwork as a gateway onto knowledge. Small’s innovative monograph presents Hélio Oiticica’s work from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, highlighting folding, diagramming, coloring, and the body as object as four foundational artistic procedures in four chapters,… Full Review

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk was released on the occasion of the British painter’s 2015 solo exhibition at Serpentine Gallery. The compendium features Yiadom-Boakye’s stunning painterly and writerly interrogations of fictional characters and black figures in her paintings, etchings, short stories, poems, and essays, along with texts by artist Glenn Ligon, critic Hilton Als, and the exhibition’s organizer, Amira Gad. Verses After Dusk asks readers and viewers to unravel the conventional architecture around what it means to represent a body in space; to convey personhood in the form of a portrait; and to take on the psychological, cultural, and social… Full Review

The spectacular new Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy, which opened on the fall of 2015, is in a very real sense a twenty-first-century manifestation of two closely associated late eighteenth-century European cultural and intellectual accomplishments. The remarkable invention of the public museum is deeply connected to the development of art history as an independent academic discipline. Both are manifestations of the Enlightenment belief that the appreciation of art might shape moral and ethical character, that people’s lives might be improved and transformed by experiencing art. This Kantian notion found a practical application by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his… Full Review

Existing African arts and cultures scholarship’s disproportionate attention on how twin births constitute a problem to parents and community is challenged in Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures, as the volume takes a dialectic approach to show how twins embody ambiguity. The subtitle, “Double Trouble, Twice Blessed,” foregrounds this premise. In several African cultures, twins are viewed through the prism of complementary duality, which is fundamental to African belief systems and worldviews. The various essays in the volume capture this double meaning. Twins are viewed in both positive and negative lights; as a source of antagonisms but also harmony… Full Review

Peruvian Featherworks: Art of the Precolumbian Era, edited by Heidi King, is an important contribution to a profoundly complex yet largely overlooked artistic genre: Andean featherwork. While feather mosaics from Mesoamerica have received much scholarly attention and praise, featherwork of the Andes has largely been ignored. In a review of The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (click here for review) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2007, Suzanne Muchnic noted that “in the world of art, feathers are regarded with a certain kind of dread . . . feathers are trouble” (Suzanne Muchnic, “The… Full Review

Is interiority a place or a state of mind? According to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen, the editors of Interiors and Interiority, we are wrong to pose the question as “either-or”; even “both-and” is an insufficiently capacious answer. Backed up by twenty-two essays, mostly by German and U.S. scholars, Lajer-Burcharth and Söntgen argue that the relationship between interiors and interiority is not limited to private spaces and individual psychology but engages just as ineluctably with complex dynamics of performativity, cultural mobility, technology, and material agency. Such an encompassing topic must hold, at the same time, an uncertain status, as… Full Review

Unknowingly, many of us have likely come into contact with some of the primary products of China’s Dafen village: handmade oil paintings, which resemble Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) and other “masterworks,” that hang in hotels, restaurants, and homes, and are sold online and in souvenir shops, galleries, and chain stores around the world. Located in Shenzhen, a megacity across from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China’s first Special Economic Zone, Dafen has heretofore been known mostly to outsiders—if at all—through sensationalist news coverage. Winnie Won Yin Wong’s Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade not only… Full Review