Browse Recent Book Reviews

Reiko Tomii’s Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan is an impeccably researched and well-written contribution to the modernist art history of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. It also presents a challenge to an art history of modernisms beyond Euramerica. The research deals via case studies with a particular Japanese conceptual artist, Matsuzawa Yutaka (1922–2006); a performance and happenings group called The Play centred in the Kansai; and a regional collective called GUN (Group Ultra Niigata) that staged art events and other vanguard practices from Niigata on the north coast of Japan. Tomii’s challenge to… Full Review

In a brief epilogue to The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700, Laurinda Dixon connects the “nerds” and “geeks” of today’s culture with the intellectual tradition that is her primary subject (190). From medieval ascetics to Renaissance stargazers, intellectuals of the past, like their modern counterparts, were often considered oddballs whose unconventional ideas were greeted as more deluded or dangerous than transformational. From ancient Greece to the birth of modern psychology, philosophers and physicians attempted to explain the somber moods and social isolation typical of many intellectuals as symptoms of a disease known as… Full Review

As a literary genre, the thèse- or habilitation-turned-book will have few genuine enthusiasts. These texts are long and often not very lively. Among the examples I’ve encountered, Philippe Geinoz’s Relations au travail: Dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubism: Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy [Relations at work: Dialogue between poetry and painting in the cubist epoch--Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Reverdy] is among the very best. Indeed, if I had encountered it sooner, it might have enriched some of my own recent work on Pablo Picasso’s milieu. That’s because the issues in which Geinoz and I are both interested revolve around… Full Review

Amid a litany of compelling critical-theory trajectories that have garnered attention over the last twenty or so years (Afrofuturism, Afro-Pessimism, etc.) and a wave of ideas about how blackness circulates as an object of theoretical inquiry as interiority, form, materiality, flesh, and most recently “liquidity,” no term is perhaps more contested (in both public and academic spheres) than the subject of Derek Conrad Murray’s new book—post-blackness. According to Murray, an art historian and visual-culture theorist, post-blackness has “paradoxically become the most talked about and debated issue in contemporary African American art” (1) while simultaneously inciting an almost primal vitriol in… Full Review

In De institutione feminae christianae (On the Education of Christian Women, 1524), Juan Luis Vives wrote of elderly women, “When a woman is free of all carnal desire and has fulfilled her duties of bearing and bringing up children, she will emanate an odor that is more heavenly than earthly, and shall say and do nothing but what is of great sanctity and may serve as an example to those younger than she. ‘Then her name will begin to be known,’ as Gorgias said, ‘when her face is unknown’” (57). Contrary to the image Vives evokes of… Full Review

Robert Ryman’s paintings are indifferent to discourse. They require no insider knowledge or textual elaboration. On the contrary, words often only muddy the waters. In Ryman’s words, “You cannot understand painting by explaining something. You can only understand painting by experience” (192). This makes the task of writing about Ryman’s work exceedingly difficult. However, in Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Suzanne Hudson writes with eloquence and perspicuity to bring Ryman’s work to a wider audience on its own terms. The book documents the development of Ryman’s art from the early 1950s to the turn of the century, exploring Ryman’s biographical… Full Review

The two books under review offer distinct takes on the way space was understood and reproduced in the Low Countries (the Dutch Republic, in particular, although both volumes explore Flemish sources as well). Both are concerned with the production of space in two-dimensional forms—in maps, prints, and paintings, above all. And while the arguments and claims made by the respective volumes are not quite mutually exclusive, the implications and trajectories they sketch out are markedly different—heading, in fact, in nearly opposite directions. Elizabeth Sutton’s Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age looks backward to an earlier historiography and to… Full Review

I inevitably discuss Alfred Barr’s 1936 diagram from the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art when I teach surveys of modernism, but I had never noticed a curious point that Gordon Hughes raises in the introduction of his Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism. Of all the movements charted along the way to the two destinations, non-geometrical and geometrical abstract art, only Orphism “goes exactly nowhere” (3). In his sumptuously illustrated and beautifully written book, Hughes takes up the question of why Delaunay—for Hughes the quintessential representative of Orphism—has been relegated to a footnote… Full Review

Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that institution’s first survey of their collection of art by Americans of African descent. Each of the essays in the catalogue provides critical justifications for treating art and craftsmanship produced by African Americans as separate from a larger body of American art, while also noting the tenuousness of doing so. In the catalogue’s foreword, Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) Director and Chief Executive Officer Timothy Rub describes the historical exclusion of black artists within broader institutional art structures, and the unevenness of the PMA in acquiring… Full Review

Greek tragedy and comedy form a central strand of ancient life that we have inherited and made our own: ancient plays are still performed, still inspire new authorship, still inform us about ancient life; but they also established the very genres that continue in our operas, musicals, television, and film. By the end of the fourth-century BCE, any ambitious Greek city had a stone theater of some sort, and remains of ancient theaters are ubiquitous in Mediterranean landscapes. This handsome volume, edited by Rune Frederiksen, Elizabeth Gebhard, and Alexander Sokolicek, presents twenty-six collected papers given at a conference in Athens… Full Review