Browse Recent Book Reviews

What is the place of politicized violence within democratic society, and what role do fine artists play in this debate? Ross Barrett takes up these questions in Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art, a thematic study that probes how American painters working between 1820 and 1890 navigated “the ideological difficulties and symbolic possibilities” (3) of the subject of insurrection. Barrett’s case-study approach focuses five trim chapters on seven easel paintings inspired by specific incidents of contemporary political unrest. Employing a diverse range of evidence including artist biography, historical context, popular visual culture, formal analysis, and… Full Review

Michalis Pichler’s The Ego and Its Own takes ownership of Max Stirner’s philosophical incantation of the same name originally published in 1844. Appearing four years before the Communist Manifesto, Stirner’s text aimed at “not an overthrow of an established order but . . . elevation above it” (Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907). Both books are split into two parts: part 1, entitled “Man,” considers the ways in which an individual defines her or his substance, be it citizenship (“Political Liberalism”), labor (“Social Liberalism”), or critical activity (“Humane Liberalism”); part 2… Full Review

In 2016, the much-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is slated to open on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The museum’s mission, as stated on its website, “to help all Americans see just how central African American history is for all,” links the act of viewing to the acts of remembrance and understanding the museum promotes. Fittingly, Mabel O. Wilson devotes the prologue and epilogue of her study of twentieth-century black-organized public history exhibitions and museums, Negro Buildings: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, with the circumstances surrounding the NMAAHC… Full Review

In the last decade, the study of eighteenth-century Qing court art has become its own subfield of late imperial Chinese art, with specific objectives pursued from a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective. In the wake of the revisionist “New Qing History” that has sought to displace the Sinocentrism of earlier historical narratives, the art commissioned by the last dynasty’s non-Han ruling elite has come to appear more complex than what the labels “hybrid” or “exotic” might convey. (On the objectives of the New Qing History, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 [Winter 2004]: 193–206.) Tibetan, Mongolian, Inner… Full Review

As part of the celebrations attending its eightieth anniversary, the Musée Marmottan Monet organized an exhibition of its namesake’s famous work Impression, soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise, 1872). The painting has long been considered the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection, and the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue offer an opportunity to present new research on this well-studied picture. Readers familiar with the extensive literature may wonder whether there remains anything left to be said about this painting. In other words, what light can this new research shed on Monet’s Sunrise? What significance does the painting… Full Review

Although the Iron Age (circa 1200 to 600 BCE) Levant (a zone covering territory in present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan) is not familiar ground for most art historians, Marian H. Feldman’s masterful book Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant will draw diverse readers into its dynamic world aswirl with social networks and enchanting objects. Feldman focuses on the ninth to seventh centuries BCE in the Levant, but her study casts back to the second millennium BCE and projects geographically east of the Tigris River in what is now Iraq… Full Review

Katherine Roeder’s new monograph on Winsor McCay nicely bridges the divide between the sometimes insular scholarship on comic art and the broader field of what I have taken to calling visual modernities. Expanding beyond the fine arts, visual modernities includes animation, comics, early film, poster art, photography, and everyday design, all of which emerged as the vernacular face of twentieth-century visual and media modernization. In Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, Roeder situates her subject’s prolific career within the context of rising consumerism, urban middle-class anxieties, and modernist self-reflexivity. McCay… Full Review

The exhibition In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art featured thirty-four artists, most of whom live in Haiti, and, according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, over “70 of their paintings, prints, sculptures, installations and mixed-media pieces drawn mainly from loans as well as the museum’s holdings” (8) representing a richer and complex set of cultural and spiritual histories. The well-illustrated catalogue, edited by Donald J. Cosentino (professor emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA), presents a rich analysis of the power of the visual and the complex relationships among regeneration, spirituality, and the livability of death. … Full Review

Douglas N. Dow’s Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform is a welcome contribution to scholarly literature on the under-researched topic of the relationships between Florentine art, devotion, and religious reform in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As Dow observes on the first page of his introduction, the works, authors, and patrons that he examines have not simply been largely overlooked; they seem actively to have been avoided by scholars more preoccupied by earlier trends and later developments (1). Dow’s strategic response to this lacuna is a series of tightly focused case… Full Review

Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli’s edited volume, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity, is the latest contribution to a growing body of English-language scholarship on photography in Italy. As Hill and Minghelli state in their introduction to the volume, their goal is to reveal something of “the current global culture of the image” (4) within the triangulation of Italian identity, photography, and modernity. Although not intended as a national history, the book nonetheless makes a claim for the particularity of the Italian case, arguing that Italy’s relationship to both photography and modernity has historically… Full Review