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The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the catalogue essays are all of permanent importance and will be required reading for those interested in Japanese art history. The catalogue begins with an essay entitled "Patriarchs Heading West: An Introduction," written by the exhibition’s curators, Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit. In it, they offer historiographical observations and delineate some of the interpretative methodologies that will be developed in the… Full Review

Many art historians are familiar with the work produced in India during the period of Mughal rule (1526–1857). All surveys of world art illustrate the Taj Mahal, the stunning tomb commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan for his wife on the bank of the Yamuna River at Agra. Most surveys also include pages from the magnificent albums compiled for the Mughals, whether intricate scenes of court receptions with splendid arrays of bejeweled courtiers or stunning studies of individual animals and birds. (Those interested can see some of these album pages in the exhibition currently traveling around the United States or… Full Review

Annabel Wharton’s Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks is the biography by proxy of a sacred site. It chronicles not the possession of Jerusalem via military conquest or pilgrimage, but rather the smaller-scale possession of proxies for it, the acquisition and construction of a series of surrogates for this most famously contested of holy sites. Following twists and turns of history from the early Christian period to the present, Wharton studies the ways in which proxies for the city have been sold. She also argues that these different iterations of Jerusalem have intersected with moments in what we might call… Full Review

Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus in a perfect position to produce a synthesis, and this is indeed an excellent survey of the material. Time and again he is able to cut through conflicting bodies of opinion and produce authoritative interpretations or offer new insights into problematic material. The book discusses art and architecture, organizing it both chronologically and by material in a way that is appropriate and easy to follow. The writing… Full Review

Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth provides American audiences with a rare opportunity to intimately view twelve drawings (doubling the number in U.S. collections) and three documents by the hand of one of history’s most revered artists, all on loan from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence and never before exhibited in the United States. These original works are accompanied by six portraits of the artist (my favorite is the enigmatic bronze medal by Leone Leoni, 1561); six posthumous publications of his poetry, including one sonnet set to music by Benjamin Britten (1943); a twentieth-century bronze replica of Michelangelo’s marble Vatican… Full Review

When I received a copy of this research report in the mail, I was astonished by its heft: 140 pages of charts, graphs, and their explanations! These are preceded by an introduction by Dana Gioia, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, and brief summaries of ten key findings. This last section has provided good headlines for a few stories in the general press, like, “Nearly two million Americans are artists,” or, “Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations.” Understanding these findings properly requires study. After all, this is a report of statistics, not an interpretation of… Full Review

Joseph Beuys famously proposed that, “every human being is an artist” (Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field Character,” in Art into Society, Society into Art, trans. Caroline Tisdall, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974, 48). How, then, do we understand the relationship between artists and audience? The Art of Participation, an extremely ambitious, multifaceted exhibition and catalogue by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides numerous potential inroads to considering this question, among others. Desiring to determine whether there is an inherent conflict between the institutional goals of the… Full Review

Act/React, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent exhibition of interactive installation art, presented work by six contemporary artists: Janet Cardiff, Brian Knep, Liz Phillips, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. While all employ some combination of customized computer software, surveillance cameras, digital video and projection, electronic photocells and circuits, microcontrollers, synthesizers, and amplifiers, the resulting artworks nonetheless conceal their technological underpinnings. Focusing on “non-technical” interactivity, which guest curator George Fifield specifies in the accompanying catalogue as activities that are “performed with the entire body of the viewer” (31), the exhibition elicited kinetic play, as one body moved toward and… Full Review

Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) remains a towering figure in the history of print and the graphic arts as well as in the development of early modern geography. He emerged from a relatively unexceptional background as a goldsmith and engraver of copper plates—the two professions went hand in hand in the Low Countries guild system in which he trained—to found one of the most important printing houses in northern Europe and to become the publisher of arguably the most influential series of books of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. De Bry's "Les Grands Voyages," which was supplemented by his… Full Review

London-born in 1902, Adrian Stokes spent some years during the 1920s in Italy looking at early Renaissance art and, soon enough, writing about it. Like many aesthetes, he found himself by moving south. After some unfocused essays and books, which he did not republish, he then created two masterpieces: Quattro Cento (1932), a study of fifteenth-century sculpture, and Stones of Rimini (1934), a very elaborate analysis of the Tempio Malatestiana in Rimini. His early life must have been full of tensions, for although he was a close friend of Ezra Pound, Stokes had a Jewish mother and was a lover… Full Review