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In 1998, French museums celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of Eugène Delacroix by staging a diverse, exciting series of exhibitions of his work. One of the smallest shows centered on a single painting, the monumental Battle of Taillebourg, made for the Galeries historique de Versailles in 1837 and now housed in the museum at the Château de Versailles, which hosted the exhibition. Accompanied by a modest but excellent catalogue, the show examined the painting and its preparatory drawings, along with a handful of lithographs, sculptures, and several other battle paintings. Other museums have since followed suit, adopting this… Full Review

The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 was a defining moment in modern Japan’s history. The tremors and aftershocks caused significant damage, but even more destructive were the out-of-control fires that raged across the cityscape in the aftermath. Over forty-five percent of Tokyo and ninety percent of Yokohama were razed, with over ninety-one thousand people killed, thirteen thousand missing, and fifty-two thousand injured. While there were heartening episodes of self-sacrifice, other stories suggest that tragedy fed tragedy, as the disorder that sometimes follows in disaster’s wake brought privation and disease, theft and violence. The opportunistic murders of prominent leftist activists and… Full Review

Historian Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World picks up, chronologically speaking, where his prior book, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), left off—in 1670. In Innocence Abroad Schmidt trained his scholarly gaze on Dutch encounters with and conceptions of the New World in the first century of the Dutch Republic. In Inventing Exoticism he casts a wider net, to describe how around the turn of the eighteenth century “a new conception of the exotic world and a new conceit of Europe came to be, and… Full Review

Ian Verstegen’s new book, Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation, examines the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, specifically the altarpieces of the chapels, in light of the order and their beliefs. His focus is on Barocci and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings, despite the fact that other artists were available and Barocci was expensive, slow, always in demand by numerous patrons, and did not even live in Rome. Verstegen asks some key questions that successfully frame his… Full Review

There are two questions that must be considered before a review of these two books is presented: What is a Latino and what is Latino art? The term Latino, as used by the authors of these very interesting and different perspectives on the subject of Latino art in particular, refers to the descendants of people of Latin America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula who were either born in or moved to the United States. Today, the Latino community's numbers are growing rapidly. Latinos already outnumber non-Hispanic whites in New Mexico and California, and by 2050 the U.S. Census… Full Review

Stefanie Solum opens this stimulating book by discussing a question fundamental for those interested in artistic patronage in Renaissance Florence: whether or not laywomen commissioned significant paintings, sculptures, or buildings in the city during the fifteenth century. Archival sources, the lifeblood of patronage studies, suggest that they did not; essentially nothing in the existing documentary record ties any woman, as patron, to any major fifteenth-century project (6). Arguing that archival silence should not stymie investigation of this issue, Solum contends that one can address the topic by employing a methodology that considers the work of art as, essentially, a document—a… Full Review

Doing justice to the importance of Megan R. Luke’s compelling study of the German artist Kurt Schwitters’s late work of the 1930s and 1940s requires taking stock of how Schwitters’s richly contradictory art has previously been understood. The story as usually told—following John Elderfield’s foundational monograph (Kurt Schwitters, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985)—goes something like this: soon after the end of the First World War, Schwitters began making what he called Merzbilder, works joining the recent innovations of abstraction and collage to one another in an unprecedented manner. In 1919, in his first statement about these… Full Review

Begun in the winter of 1912 and known collectively as the papiers collés, Pablo Picasso’s collages of pasted papers, from newsprint and wallpaper to fine drawing paper, have been the battleground for several of the most fraught methodological debates in modernist art history. In the 1980s and 1990s, the interpretive field was divided between, on the one hand, scholars who read the newspapers as incorporating conscious reference by Picasso to the political events or mass cultural phenomena of his day and, on the other, those who objected that such readings succumbed precisely to the naturalistic and referential logic dissected… Full Review

The study of Victorian architecture has matured. At the forefront of recent achievements in scholarship now stands Michael Hall’s enormous and enormously rich biography of one of the greatest High Victorians, George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907). Hall’s monumental achievement is twofold. First, he has conquered the intrinsic difficulty of the project. Bodley’s personal and office papers are lost, and this unhappy paucity is complemented by the almost more troublesome richness of the surviving documentation that is dispersed among myriad clients and acquaintances. Hall has mastered this hard-to-assemble material and masked the difficulty of this encyclopedic accomplishment in a biography that, while… Full Review

The cover of Foong Ping’s The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court features a detail from a painting titled Early Spring, dated 1072 and signed by Guo Xi. By virtue of its imposing size and matchless virtuosity of brushwork as well as the relative abundance of historical records concerning Guo Xi, a famed court painter of the Northern Song period (960–1127), this magnificent work in ink and light colors on silk occupies a central position in our understanding of the history of Chinese painting; it also epitomizes the achievements of one of the… Full Review