Browse Recent Book Reviews

The history of emotions, their cultural expression, and their representation in the arts of early modern Europe are currently a subject of much interest. In recent years, exhibitions and collaborative research projects from the Netherlands to Australia have been devoted to this theme. The fourteen essays gathered in Facts and Feelings: Retracing Emotions of Artists, 1600–1800, edited by Hannelore Magnus and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, are the product of a symposium held at the University of Leuven in December 2012. The goal of the book is not to gauge the expression of emotion in art, but instead to plumb… Full Review

Mary Ann Carroll: First Lady of the Highwaymen is the fourth Highwaymen book by Gary Monroe, Daytona State College professor of fine arts and photography. Virginia Lynn Moylan’s unexpectedly moving foreword outlines the context of Monroe’s study: the omission of black visual artists and black female artists from discussions of “cultural expression” in the United States. In 1995, Jim Fitch, then-director of the Museum of Florida Art and Culture, wrote “‘The Highwaymen’ is a name I’ve given to a group of black artists working on the East coast of Florida from approximately 1955 to the present. So called because their… Full Review

Ara Osterweil argues in Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film that the medium operates on the spectator’s sensorium in a uniquely direct and intense way. Films can emphasize this link by depicting bodies in extreme circumstances; for instance, bodies immobilized by drugs, dead and being autopsied, or epileptic and seizing are just some of the precarious versions of corporeality that experimental filmmakers documented in the 1960s and 1970s. But within the array of films considered in Osterweil’s book, representations of the body engaged in sexual activity are the most central. Postwar avant-garde film, like the hard-core pornography… Full Review

In Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality, and Symbolism, Peter Cooke explores the artist’s work from its beginnings in the early 1850s to the final ambitious projects of the late 1890s. He examines Moreau’s lifelong endeavor to revitalize le grand art in France—history painting in its most ambitious form—and to combat the endemic materialism of the age with a spiritual and moral type of painting. In the 1840s, Moreau studied under François-Édouard Picot and was enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, only to drop out after two unsuccessful Prix de Rome attempts. Thereafter, he embarked on an exploration of what… Full Review

“I wouldn’t live anywhere else but Rome,” gushed Harriet Hosmer in a letter in 1854. “I can learn more and do more here, in one year, than I could in America in ten” (35). Hosmer was among a few dozen American women sculptors who sought training in Rome during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the subject of Melissa Dabakis’s A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. The project offers a new contribution to the study of American artists working in international contexts, to the body of scholarship on American sculpture and its connections with political… Full Review

With The Bernward Gospels: Art, Memory, and the Episcopate in Medieval Germany, Jennifer P. Kingsley has made a valuable contribution to English-language scholarship on Ottonian art history. Her immediate focus is an illuminated Gospel book made at the beginning of the eleventh century for the eminent bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (r. 993–1022). The manuscript (Hildesheim, Dom- und Diözesanmuseum, Domschatz 18 [Bernward Gospels]) is illustrated with twenty-four miniatures featuring New Testament content in addition to evangelist portraits. It presents a substantial visual program whose scope conforms with the expansion of Gospel imagery at several German scriptoria around the turn of… Full Review

Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age is an illustrated catalogue produced to accompany the Peabody Essex Museum and Rijksmuseum exhibition of the same name. Focusing attention on the important role the Dutch played in facilitating and celebrating the material results of cross-cultural trade, it draws together a collection of stunning objects that were exchanged between Europe and Asia in the seventeenth century. The objects selected are remarkably wide-ranging not only in their forms and media—jewelry, textile, porcelain, furniture, sculpture, clothing, and oil painting, to name just a few—but also in terms of each object’s place… Full Review

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