Recently Published Reviews

A curious pocket-size manuscript made in colonial Mexico, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has long eluded synthetic assessment, for good reason: its diminutive size belies the complex, hybrid contents—over one hundred pages thick with information in various forms by different hands, previously dismissed as apparently miscellaneous. Recorded primarily in an Aztec pictorial system of writing around 1580, its seemingly incongruent sections engage a range of... Full Review

Following up on her 2004 book on Paul Klee and the decorative in modern art (Cambridge University Press), Jenny Anger’s latest volume recounts the history of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (1910–32), a Berlin-based cultural venture bringing together art, performance, theater, periodical publishing, teaching, and bookselling, thus continuing her exploration of an expansive notion of modernism that works against essentializing conceptions of the different arts. Simultaneously, the volume... Full Review

This splendidly illustrated exhibition catalog is devoted to one particularly prominent Attic vase painter, the so-named Berlin Painter. Whereas an exhibition on one artist may still count as a logical choice by curators of an art museum, such a focus on the oeuvre of one individual has become highly unusual within scholarly approaches to Greek art and visual culture over recent decades. The catalog addresses both an art-museum public and scholars of Greek art and archaeology.... Full Review

As suggested by the title of her erudite and intellectually ambitious new book, Malika Maskarinec argues that form is a dynamic concept in modern German philosophical aesthetics. Using the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of Formkraft as a critical lens, Maskarinec reads not only the aesthetic theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Simmel, Theodor Lipps, and Paul Klee but also the experimental writings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin, in terms of a dynamic whereby... Full Review

Felipe Pereda’s study Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age offers the reader both an enlightening and a frustrating experience: enlightening in that it provides new insights into the contexts of an important group of Golden Age Spanish religious works, and frustrating due to the author’s repeated attempts to force his investigations into a difficult and ultimately unsustainable theoretical framework.

At the outset Pereda states that, instead of having... Full Review

In spite of decades of scholarship on the history of the book in the age of print, the central mystery that plagues any given history of the book or a book remains the elusive nature of readers’ reception and interpretation of both words and pictures. While the works of Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have contributed substantially to the history of reading in Western Europe, there are many questions that remain about the nature of book... Full Review

C/O Berlin, a nonprofit venue established in 2000 and solely dedicated to photography, celebrated Boris Mikhailov’s eightieth birthday with an exhibition of five series of photographs. Case History, I am not I, Suzi et cetera, Diary, and the most recent, Temptation of Death, cover his work since the 1960s, when Mikhailov, who worked as a train engineer in Kharkiv, Ukraine, began taking photographs. He is an autodidact whose early work depicts people he... Full Review

As the title suggests, Emily C. Burns’s Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France is an evocative look at the “transnational frontiers” where visual art and cultural performance intersected alongside notions of identity, nation, and belonging for French citizens, American image-makers, and Native American performers between 1865 and 1914. This is a powerful study that focuses on different conceptions, depictions, and deployments of “the American West,” which Burns rightly... Full Review

Social housing constructed in Middle Eastern cities since the 1940s has been presented as a solution to several pressing problems, from the crisis of slums and inadequate accommodations for industrial workers to the urban segregation and inequality sustained by colonial housing policies. Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity, edited by Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour, discusses the conditions that call for social housing... Full Review

The undulating dotted lines of Mamultjunkunya (2009; pictured at left), by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri of the Pintupi language group, depict a site that appears, within the painting, to be in constant motion: Lake Mackay. This salt lake “features prominently” in the Tingari ceremonial cycle of Tjapaltjarri’s Western Desert region (15). Through song and dance, the ceremony recounts the ancestors’ fashioning of their “Country.” Within the gallery, Mamultjunkunya’s ripples muddle... Full Review