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As declared on the dust jacket for The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, “Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale.” Often dismissed as a blip by both contemporaries and subsequent historians, the study of ecclesiastics has received limited scholarly attention (excepted for a few good essays and volumes), despite its interested appeal. This book, edited by… Full Review

In looking at modernist buildings, few would be surprised to see ceramic tiles or neocrete coating punctuating the pristine white surface of a rectilinear, multi-level, reinforced concrete building. Projects realized during the interwar period in Japan, however, might also feature wooden pilotis, tatami mats, and thatched roofs. Far from assuming “a style-less style,” as the architect Horiguchi Sutemi claimed of his own creations, the residential, civic, commercial, and recreational structures designed by Horiguchi and his forward-looking peers aimed to create an international architecture, kokusai kenchiku, that expressed the new and modern with distinctive regional inflections. International Architecture in… Full Review

Boris Groys’s Art Power brings together fourteen essays published between 1997 and 2007, and one previously unpublished essay, no date. It ranges over intellectual positions promulgated since the Enlightenment, so the text will be familiar to readers of long-standing disputes about concepts of the modern, the new, the different, the autonomous, the identical, the heterogeneous, et al. All of the essays are written in a philosophical tone, some with astute juxtapositions of art and politics. There are good chapters on Hitler and art and Stalinist dictates in the Soviet Union. Given space limitations, I can only focus on some of… Full Review

Erina Duganne’s The Self in Black and White offers five overlapping case studies of photographic projects created in and around New York City during the postwar period. In four chapters and an epilogue the book explores the photographic practices of the African American Kamoinge Workshop; Bruce Davidson’s “American Negro” project and the Office of Economic Opportunity’s “Profiles of Poverty” exhibition; Davidson and Roy DeCarava’s civil rights photography; DeCarava’s photographs of Harlem; and Dawoud Bey’s “Harlem USA” project. The chapters work together to explore the relational nature of selfhood as expressed through photographic practice. Duganne’s book is an ambitious and… Full Review

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) lived long enough to see his role as founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and dissected. Like John Everett Millais, he was later charged with abandoning his early revolutionary artistic goals and pandering to mainstream taste. Hunt’s popularity represented less of a movement away from early idealism than a gradual refinement and elaboration of it, and the public came to love the work that resulted. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition with the same title, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision offers new insights into how this process unfolded in ten essays, which discuss Hunt’s work from… Full Review

Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus… Full Review

The exhibition Picasso Looks at Degas at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened with a statement attributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” That Degas was among those judged worthy of theft—discerned as early as the young Spaniard’s first show in Paris (1901)—was first connected to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Robert Rosenblum (in Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, ed. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher. Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986, 53–60). In Picasso: Style and Meaning (New York: Phaidon, 2002), Elizabeth Cowling opened the way to a broader affiliation by… Full Review

Over the course of a career that spans more than thirty-odd years, Marina Abramović has maintained an unwavering commitment to a form of performance that tests the psychological and physical extremes of the body. The word “commitment” indeed might be the singular most defining characteristic of her art, as well as her approach to the practice of being an artist. Among an early, important group of artists who moved away from the utilization of inert materials in favor of a direct employment of their own bodies (as tool, medium, performer, instigator, facilitator), Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern… Full Review

In Winslow, Arizona, an immigration inspector stopped a consular official and asked him to produce identification. Despite the card provided, the inspector doubted the official’s status and demanded to see a laborer’s certificate, perhaps hoping to verify identification through the photograph that was mandatory on such certificates. Although this scene sounds like it could be taking place today under SB 1070, the exchange occurred in 1903, and the consular official was not of Mexican descent. During the period of Chinese Exclusion in the United States, the government targeted Chinese not only at the borders but within the country’s interior as… Full Review

The portrait, defined here as an accurate physiognomic likeness of an individual rendered in an independent image, has been seen as a clear marker of the differences between the representational strategies and priorities of the medieval period and the modern. Indeed, as Stephen Perkinson notes in his introduction to The Likeness of the King, it is tempting to understand “the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a visual symptom marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages” (6). Perkinson counters this with a detailed exploration of how the… Full Review