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Who knew? Certainly there were documents from the sixteenth century around the publishing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp that mentioned payments to artists who added color to intaglio prints. At the same time in Germany, a quite respectable living was made in the print trade by individuals known as Briefmaler, or print colorists, who were included among the depicted professions in Jost Amman’s Book of Trades (Frankfurt, 1568). Not to mention all those surviving woodcuts from the earlier fifteenth-century, which were almost always religious images of Christ and the saints and were almost inevitably colored, especially with vivid… Full Review

The Victorian Nude was an unusual choice for the inaugural exhibition at Tate Britain since it treated a subject rarely identified with nineteenth-century British culture. After all, despite a pile of books in recent years revealing the scope of Victorian sexuality, the popular correlation between prudery and the Victorian age remains strong. By choosing the saucy word “Exposed” for the exhibition’s title, the museum drew attention to the subject’s previously neglected character and to its inevitable prurient associations. In fact, the Victorian nude has been the focus of scholarly attention in surveys of Victorian art and in the many… Full Review

Time always takes revenge on a critic. Any writer with an acute sense of the contemporary in art is bound to appear dated eventually, so the recent exhibition and catalogue of Clement Greenberg's private collection at the Portland Art Museum necessarily raises the question of taste: Here it is the critic who is up for judgment. It is easy to notice the fallibility of Greenberg's choices, and in a way too obvious. Would Charles Baudelaire or Denis Diderot come off any better if we saw a show of their favorite pictures? Probably not. Would their best judgments seem suspect? The… Full Review

According to Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), private spaces in households are a Dutch seventeenth-century invention, despite their commonplace nature today. A serious new exhibition and a handsomely produced accompanying catalogue set out to explore this premise by showing Dutch representations of household interiors, as well as actual period furnishings. The exhibition organizer and catalogue supervisor, Mariët Westermann, is far from naïve about the differences between sanitized, conceptual representations and the contemporary actualities; after all, this tension within "Dutch realism" lies at the heart of any interpretation of such pictures. Westermann… Full Review

See also: Hans Mielke, "Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichnungen":http://caareviews.org/reviews/250, reviewed by Dorothy Limouze As the European Cultural Capital of the year 2001, Rotterdam had something quite special to offer—a sensational exhibition, the likes of which will scarcely, if ever, occur again. Almost all of the total graphic work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–69) was on view this past summer at the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in the Netherlands. This splendid show was conceived in close collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will be shown this fall. … Full Review

By invoking the name of this well-known Dutch cultural idol in the title of their magnificent exhibition and catalogue, the organizers of Vermeer and the Delft School assured historically packed houses for both of the museums that hosted this show. As visitors realized upon entering, however, the show did not focus narrowly upon the genius Vermeer, who produced only about sixteen of the 159 works on display. Rather, its scope was broadly historical, examining the rise of Vermeer's native Delft as an artistic center during the course of the seventeenth century and probing the special properties of Delft painting. Is… Full Review

Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein was a stunning exhibition of 152 drawings and examples of stained glass (see the exhibition review by Christiane Andersson in Burlington Magazine CXLII no. 1173, December 2000, pp. 801–803). The Los Angeles venue included a two-day international symposium (September 15–16, 2000). The exhibition was also seen at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Perhaps the single greatest achievement of this ambitious undertaking, including its handsome and fully-illustrated catalogue, is that it serves to remind us that stained glass played an enormously important role in Renaissance Germany and… Full Review

Emblazoned on the cover of the Louvre's new Chardin exhibition catalogue is the image of a girl child holding a racquet and shuttlecock but curiously made-up and dressed like an adult woman. Her cheeks are rouged, her hair is powdered and she wears a circlet of ribbon tied enticingly around a slim white neck. In contrast to the solemn abstract beauty of Basket of Wild Strawberries splashed on the Louvre's 1979 Chardin exhibition catalogue, this detail, taken from Girl with Shuttlecock, cuts a different sort of figure, one speaking directly to the sensibilities of the 1990s. Chardin's representation of… Full Review

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) marched to a different drum than his fellow American painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. When confreres explored mountain ranges, he discovered marshlands; when they settled in New York City to establish reputations, he continued a peripatetic existence; when others were repeating tired variations on a single theme, he struck out in new directions. His marsh scenes, storm paintings, orchid and hummingbird pictures, and late reclining floral still lifes: These are American originals. Heade can lay claim to a more diverse and creative body of work than almost any of his colleagues, as… Full Review

Laurie Norton Moffatt, Director of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, forthrightly states her agenda in her essay "The People's Painter": "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People invites reflection on Rockwell as a force in twentieth-century American art and culture" (24). Moffatt reorients the critical debate by emphasizing Rockwell's cultural influence, rather than dithering about his status as either an artist or an illustrator. The admixture of popular culture studies and art history introduces Rockwell into an expanded art historical canon that embraces both avant-garde and kitsch. The exhibition catalogue reflects Moffatt's methodology: Fourteen art historians, historians, and… Full Review