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There is something of a difficulty in reviewing two such dissimilar publications—an edited collection and a monograph—yet they have a number of themes in common: both attend to the normative requirements of engaging with gender, race, and class (if not so much with sexuality); but they also intersect more particularly with issues that appear key for contemporary archival studies in the humanities. These issues might be opened with reference to the introduction to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), where Fredric Jameson noted that… Full Review

Art reproduction is seldom the focus of art-historical enquiry. In relation to the nineteenth century in particular, it remains largely uninvestigated despite the fact that the period was characterized by important changes in print technologies, including the invention of photography, the rise of intellectual property and copyright issues, the growing significance of a private art market that made extensive use of reproductive imagery, and the widespread increase in the public demand for art reproductions. These form the subject of Robert Verhoogt’s incisive and groundbreaking study, Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israëls and Ary Scheffer. The… Full Review

The History of British Art, Volume 3: 1870–Now is the final volume of three in a series edited by David Bindman and co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Tate Britain. Given the age of the Oxford History of English Art series, which dates from the 1950s (with the exception of Dennis Farr’s contribution on art produced between 1870 and 1940, which was published in 1979 as volume 11), and the dearth of British material usually included in comprehensive survey texts, a methodologically up-to-date historical survey of British art is long overdue. Yet those seeking a chronologically… Full Review

This dual retrospective of Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) and Léon Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) was without a doubt a major contribution to the expanding canon of experimental art from the sixties. Spanning Schendel’s career from the late 1950s through the late 1980s and Ferrari’s production from the late 1950s through 2007, the two hundred pieces in a variety of media, but predominantly on paper, assembled in the exhibition and exquisitely installed by MoMA curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas pleased non-specialized audiences as well as connoisseurs. Upon entering the Renne de Harnoncourt galleries of the museum, viewers could see a… Full Review

Judith Ostrowitz’s first book, Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), took as its subject the complex relationships to tradition maintained by contemporary native artists in the Pacific Northwest as they produce new artworks for a multicultural audience. Ostrowitz’s second book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-flung Territories, pursues the related question of how contemporary native artists situate their work in global venues (which are by definition cross-cultural) and how contemporary native artists mediate between local tribal demands for the protection of indigenous knowledge and cultural property and the ravenous hunger… Full Review

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands (vol.1 ,1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world… Full Review

How do artists depict the act of looking or listening, even when the object of attention is not visible in the image? What does the experience of beauty, both seen and heard, look like? And how does the image convey the aesthetic experience of the artist’s subject to the beholder? These questions were the subject of an interdisciplinary course held at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007 that culminated in an exhibition and catalogue of prints, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and music from nineteenth-century France. The catalogue includes a preface by Anthony Hirschel, director of the Smart Museum… Full Review

Although the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) may be among the most appreciated (and reproduced) images in Japanese art, rarely have they been treated with the care and attention exhibited in Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler in a masterful production by Taschen. The subject is Hiroshige’s well-known set, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei ), dating from 1856 to 1858. The volume opens with an essay by Trede setting the period context, purpose, and reception of the prints, and is followed with illustrations and descriptions by Trede and… Full Review

In the opening pages of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960, Bill Anthes describes in no uncertain terms the contribution he expects the book to make to the field of twentieth-century art scholarship: he asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he insists that “bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism” (xiii). Over the course of six chapters… Full Review

Artists figure conspicuously among Honoré de Balzac’s characters. The maniacal Frenhofer and fatally naive Sarrasine may be the most familiar to art historians, though painters and sculptors play key roles in several of the stories and novels that comprise La Comédie humaine. Some of these characters, like Joseph Bridau and Wenceslas Steinbock, recur, their lives and artworks contributing in important ways to Balzac’s morally ambiguous tales of post-Revolutionary France. It is as metaphorical counterparts to the artifice of contemporary society that Diana Knight positions these narratives of artistic identity and creative expression. The ability of artworks to seduce, deceive… Full Review