Recently Published Reviews

This collection of essays has attracted little attention since its publication in 2014, an oversight that should be remedied. Through nineteen essays and nine photo essays edited by D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated places the early modern past and the postmodern present in dialogue with one another and examines the ways in which the Renaissance has been appropriated and received in Anglo-American popular culture. As Lasansky notes in the... Full Review

The title of Figuring History, an exhibition of twenty-six large-scale works by Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), signals at least two of the show’s significant themes. Both terms have double meanings. “History” refers to people and events of the past as well as to the history of art. “Figuring” indicates both the representations of the human figure and the artists’ attempts to “puzzle out the place and meaning of those... Full Review

Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada takes an in-depth look at the artistic and biographical journey of the under-recognized African American artist and activist, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his large-scale installation and home environment, the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (1989–2004). This lush catalogue, richly illustrated with eighty photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, features insightful essays by Yael Lipschutz, art critic and archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California;... Full Review

Diarmuid Costello’s book brings together an abundance of historical and analytical debates to make clear that the philosophy of photography is a delineated field in its own right. Although the title On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry reflects Susan Sontag’s seminal book and may bring to mind Vilém Flusser’s attempt to single-handedly philosophize photography, it is in no sense similar to those approaches. Costello has gathered a rich corpus of philosophical thoughts on two... Full Review

In her microhistory of Yanhuitlan, a town in the rugged Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, Alessia Frassani complicates our understanding of the collaborative and enduring interchange of indigenous and European constituencies in New Spanish society. Although historians attempting to reconstruct the dynamics of an ancient, multiethnic community often discover that their evidence is random and scarce, the documentation of Yanhuitlan, in stone, wood, and paper, is fortuitously consistent.... Full Review

Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, offers an ambitious study of the significance of self-taught art to the production of mainstream US American artists. The expansive exhibition presents more than 250 works by 84 artists and is organized around three historic periods that, argues its curator Lynne Cooke, saw a surge in formal support for objects made beyond the conventional bounds of the art world: 1924–43, 1968–92, and 1998–2013.... Full Review

Gustave Kahn’s characterization of Symbolism as “the exteriorization of the Idea” is usually explained as the Symbolists privileging the imagination over a naturalistic art practice that reproduced the visible world. In Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Allison Morehead reorients this quotation and Symbolist art itself toward science, specifically the experimental method. One of the crucial arguments in Nature’s Experiments is that even as positivism was... Full Review

The edited volume, as a scholarly format, has proliferated in recent years but is too seldom celebrated. Its demands—principally brevity when it comes to individual essays—and its overall capaciousness produce texts and experiences of discovery this reviewer cherishes. When it comes to the topic of sociability, moreover, there could scarcely be a more appropriate form of presentation. If all books are social—collaborations linking author, editor, copyeditor, indexer, designer, printer, and... Full Review

Paper Promises: Early American Photography, curated by Mazie M. Harris, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, offered fascinating insight into the little-known history of early paper photography in the United States. Although the processes for producing metal daguerreotypes and paper photographs were introduced simultaneously in America, negative-positive paper photography was slow to catch on, despite the ostensible benefits of its reproducibility. Harris... Full Review

And then there was color. In short, this is the theme of Laura Kalba’s fascinating study, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art, which chronicles the explosion of vivid (and often artificial) colors in everyday life in late nineteenth-century France. Explaining the science and technology behind the making of both new as well as more saturated traditional colors, the book traces the many experiential and epistemic shifts that attended consumers’ willing... Full Review