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The fifteen papers collected in this book were presented at a conference in honor of Walter Cahn at the Index of Christian Art, Princeton, in 2007. As Colum Hourihane notes in his introduction, the term “Romanesque” is fraught with difficulties, and one of the themes that runs through many of the papers is a questioning of just what constitutes Romanesque style. As is usually the case with collections of this kind, however, there is no unifying theme to the volume other than the contributors’ attempts to address the subjects and questions that have been central to Cahn’s work. The… Full Review

In July of 1774, Captain James Cook arrived back in London from his second voyage. With him was a man named Mai, a native of an island called Raiatea in the South Pacific. Cook’s intention was to showcase a human souvenir—a live specimen—who would help the British understand the exotic nature of his circumnavigation. Mai remained in England for two years and returned to the South Pacific in 1776. While in England, he sat for portraits and became a national curiosity. Harriet Guest, in her book about the visual culture that attended Cook’s voyages, quotes Westminster Magazine, which claimed… Full Review

Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s, arguing that the large-scale art photography of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rineke Dijkstra, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Candida Höfer, Thomas Demand, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others, constitutes a significant trajectory within contemporary art. Second, Fried puts forward an important reevaluation of his own critical and historical account… Full Review

No other museum in the world can match the British Museum for its incomparable collection of ancient Greek architectural sculpture. While the Elgin Marbles are its best known acquisition, it also showcases sculpture from two of the “wonders” of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, as well as that of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and the Nereid Monument from Lycia. And who better to assemble and analyze these famous and influential monuments in a single volume than Ian Jenkins, who has been on the curatorial staff of the British Museum… Full Review

For art historians a seemingly incongruous incident can sometimes trigger fresh thinking about what had seemed a familiar historical landscape. Such was the impetus for this study by Christopher Wood: a curious, late fifteenth-century case of apparently bungled connoisseurship. When Conrad Celtis, the celebrated German poet laureate, historian, and antiquarian, discovered a group of over-life-sized sculptures of draped, bearded men at a monastery in the wilderness near Regensburg, he published his find as representations of ancient Druid priests. Druids, however, were never a presence in Germany, and Celtis must have known that these sculptures actually represented medieval Christian apostles and… Full Review

In the opening sentence of her book, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, Mia Mochizuki reminds us that we often see what we expect to see; consequently, we often readily overlook the unexpected, even when it is right in front of us. The decoration of Dutch Reformed churches, for instance, is typically viewed merely in terms of iconoclastic negation, leaving existing Protestant imagery unnoticed. Although numerous Catholic objects were destroyed in the Protestant war against idols, this did not stop Calvinists from generating new ecclesiastical images, ones that they could call their… Full Review

In Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Michaela Giebelhausen charts the transformations of religious painting and the “troubled emergence of a unique form of naturalistic religious painting” (2) between the 1840s and the 1860s. Her analysis draws on two types of Victorian text: theories of history painting and biblical criticism. Both were marked by substantial controversies in the decades under investigation and ultimately circled around one unsettling question: What is the nature and reality of the divine? At stake was the very essence of Christianity, and the debates were accordingly fierce. In the battle over the… Full Review

The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review

This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body was an attractive and smart show. The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, its second venue of three, offered a stunning introduction to the galleries from its entrance balcony where Allison Saar’s 2006 Cache—a life-sized, tin-clad nude figure in a fetal position held in place by a giant ball of wire—was draped across the floor beneath Baby Back, Renée Cox’s oversized blackout C-print self-portrait as a dominatrix odalisque from 2001. The two works engaged in a shrill dialogue that teetered between tongue-in-cheek humor and slap-in-the-face confrontation… Full Review