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The stated goal of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe is ambitious: “to make a significant contribution not only to the study of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe in the industrial period, but also to the examination of image’s dominance in modern culture and, ultimately, to the unending project of representing modernity” (xix). Editors Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton are to be commended for undertaking this challenging topic, and assembling a diverse group of authors whose scholarly disciplines range from art history to literature and the history of science. Although the… Full Review

The exhibition The Dancer: Degas, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec, assembled by Annette Dixon, curator of prints and drawings at the Portland Art Museum, brought together a stunning group of works in various media—paintings, sculptures, drawings, and lithographs—by three artists whose careers were defined in large measure by their attraction to the subject of dance. For those of us who were unable to see this show in person, its catalogue presents exquisite, large-scale color reproductions that allow the reader to note subtle nuances of line, facture, and support. These illustrations are especially valuable as The Dancer mixes old chestnuts such as Edgar… Full Review

The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain, which can only be seen at the National Gallery of Art, offers an excellent sequel to a series of recent exhibitions on Spanish themes, including the wonderful El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, which was on view last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Nasher Museum at Duke University (click here for review). But whereas that exhibition attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of Spanish artistic accomplishments during the early seventeenth century, The Art of Power… Full Review

The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963–2000, showcased eighty-one prints by the master African American artist in a crowd-pleasing exhibition that provided a platform for one of the lesser-known parts of Lawrence’s extensive oeuvre. The screenprints, lithographs, etchings, drypoints, and single woodcut displayed in the show represented almost the entirety of Lawrence’s output as a printmaker and were brought together courtesy of the DC Moore Gallery in New York for this show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. While the images, most of which are large and colorful in the artist’s trademark graphic figurative style, are filled with the… Full Review

The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger's work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger's work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed… Full Review

“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” (58). Urgency is an unusual accomplice to art-historical inquiry: what might prompt it now, and why should it require a “world history of art,” whatever that might be? David Carrier sees desired states of being such as world peace endangered by “the political struggles that threaten to destroy the very possibility of international cooperation” (xxvi). Academics, he believes, should respond to such threats by rethinking their disciplines as genuinely global projects. In a… Full Review

In recent decades, medieval and Renaissance textile scholarship has received greater recognition and appreciation by the art-historical community. One of the latest publications to add to this developing field is Lisa Monnas’s new book. One of the first things to note about this impressive volume is the abundant number of superb color images—they are truly breathtaking. Aside from the remarkable aesthetic attributes of the volume, Monnas’s detailed study investigates the cultural and artistic connections between silk textiles and fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings in which silk fabrics are represented. In addition to relating extant textiles to the paintings, Monnas examines… Full Review

The device of figures framing a central mythological or non-mythological composition is a frequent phenomenon in Athenian vase painting. These spectators have been interpreted as stock characters, super-numeraries, aristocrats, or simply onlookers. In his innovative Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell examines the role of spectators on Athenian vases as “guides to the construction of social identity in sixth-century Athens” (11). Stansbury-O’Donnell bases his investigation on the assumption that the spectators “watch the action, not unlike a viewer of the vase” (2). He focuses not only on the identity of the spectators but also… Full Review

Stimulated by the availability of new technologies, the pedagogy of art history is in the midst of dramatic transformation. Until recently, college courses in the discipline were customarily illustrated using manually sequenced film transparencies extracted from local slide libraries. Now, nearly overnight, it seems, art history programs have all but abandoned that tried and true method in favor of PowerPoint presentations assembling digital files downloaded from shared image databases. Meanwhile, class meetings in brick and mortar settings are giving way to electronic communications among disparately located teachers and students participating in distance-learning courses. What are the implications of this upheaval… Full Review

Unlike their Mesoamerican counterparts, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan (50–750 C.E.) left no clear record identifying those responsible for developing the sophisticated urban plan of their great city-state; the presumed rulers who commandeered the power and authority to assemble the work force required to carry out the massive construction and artistic programs at Teotihuacan remain unnamed. Although recent excavations at the Pyramid of the Moon reveal high-status burials, there are as yet no clear portraits nor excavated remains that clearly locate specific rulers. Questions about the sociopolitical makeup of Teotihuacan and the identity of their leaders have long preoccupied Pre-Columbianists, yet… Full Review