Recently Published Reviews

Meot: Korean Art from the Frank Bayley Collection at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, curated by Hyonjeong “HJ” Kim Han, celebrates Frank Bayley’s sustained admiration for Korean ceramics by framing his collection through the concept of meot—an aesthetic of balanced elegance that embraces imperfection. Presenting over sixty works spanning the Goryeo (918–1392) and Joseon (1392–1897) dynasties as well as contemporary reinterpretations, the exhibition reflects Bayley’s vision to capture Korean art’s evolution. While the exhibition gestures toward the layered complexities within Korean art, a more robust historical framework might better illuminate how shifting cultural values and aesthetic sensibilities influenced Korean… Full Review

In The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher, art historian and curator David Pullins masterfully interrogates the status of the image as an object in eighteenth-century French art. Exploring a trove of “image-objects”—defined by the material status and site of a visual image rather than its subject—the author seeks to shift our focus from artistic reception to material production. Responding to sociohistorical interrogations pioneered by Thomas Crow; the materialistic turn espoused by the scholarship of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth; serious inquiries into the decorative arts led by Katie Scott; the market-driven analyses of the late Hans Van Miegroet; and the critical… Full Review

In this compellingly argued book, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in Nineteenth-Century France, Katie Hornstein offers a new paradigm for integrating art history with animal studies: rather than considering animal representation as a theoretical or visual construct, we are asked to “see” lions as individual personages with their own perspectives, histories, and names. Whether the encounter between nineteenth-century people and lions occurred in the context of zoos and other public menageries; on ships bound from colonial Algeria to France; in the “taming” theatrics of the circus; or in lion-themed paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs, human and leonine life were… Full Review

Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia ingeniously reinvigorates the study of South Asia’s lesser-known book arts, transforming the reader’s experience into the rise and swell of artistic performance. With a unique editorial approach, the volume does much more than update Jeremiah Losty’s The Art of the Book in India (1982); it calls for active, reflexive engagement that unfolds like an event. This book is depicted in the volume through film, found object installation, and a variety of illustrated examples—book types crafted from palm leaf, paper, ink, paint, photo, and lithographic print—raising awareness of the… Full Review

Before there was Central Park, there was Seneca Village: a predominantly Black community that thrived north of the hustle and bustle of downtown Manhattan from the 1820s to the 1850s. By 1857, Seneca Village was all but gone and its residents pushed out as the city seized the land for the development of a landscaped public park that would come to stretch across fifty blocks and three avenues.  In recent years, museums around the park’s perimeter—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical, and the Museum of the City of New York, among others—have sought to address the history… Full Review

Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality extends far beyond its title, offering multifaceted considerations into medieval social classes from kings to beggars and incorporating varied textual sources from theological texts to stories of courtly love to merchant ledgers. The exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum, curated by Diane Wolfthal, with Deirdre Jackson as the in-house curator, together with its accompanying catalog, investigates the “economic revolution” (6) that occurred from around 1200 to 1600. The exhibition catalog, published in association with D Giles Limited, bridges disciplines, including contributions by an economic historian, Steven A. Epstein, and a scholar of numismatics, David… Full Review

The essays in Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America coedited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, offer a full-throated call for the decolonization of colonial Latin American art history. The volume takes its inspiration from two recent critical interventions in approaches to colonial Latin American art history. The first, Susan Verdi Webster’s groundbreaking scholarship that repopulates the Audiencia of Quito’s (Ecuador) art world with previously unrecognized Indigenous artists/artisans and their artistic practices. The second, Barbara E. Mundy’s and Aaron M. Hyman’s critique of the Vasarian “life-work model” (2015). Such a model, they argue, that typically privileges white… Full Review

It is difficult to sustain a discussion of Canterbury Cathedral, the sprawling monument at the heart of this incisive monograph, without falling into a surfeit of art-historical superlatives. The present church, which served as the seat of the chief primate of England throughout the Middle Ages (and, from 1170, as the site of the cult of the internationally renowned martyr St. Thomas Becket), ranks among the longest, largest, and most lavish medieval churches in Britain. Scholars of the Romanesque period have long celebrated the architecture and sculpture of the extension begun under Archbishop Anselm of Bec (r. 1093–1109). Scholars of… Full Review

Distinct yet intersecting debates concerning the possibilities of a global art history and a decolonial or decolonized art history have reoriented the mainstream of the discipline’s focus in the last decade. Among the art historical strategies stemming from this inquiry, an incorporative mode, seeking to bring underrepresented artists and makers into the fold of global history as moderns, emerges prominently alongside a deconstructive mode, which eschews the universality of the global in favor of a plurality of local differences and counter-institutional proposals. Both approaches have been variously formalized in recent years, reverberating through recent shifts in curatorial practice, curricular designs… Full Review

Did genre painting exist in the early twentieth century? This question forms the premise of John Fagg’s Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905–1945. Known primarily to historians of United States art as an antebellum practice and, secondarily, as a later nineteenth-century movement that recalled its predecessor, genre painting is rarely thought of as an avenue of early twentieth-century artistic expression. Yet, one of its defining features, the depiction of everyday life, appears prominently in the art of numerous practitioners of that time—even when such depictions differ politically and stylistically from earlier examples. As Fagg notes, recent scholarship by… Full Review

What to make of this book? This is a question posed several times by Stanley Abe throughout his innovatively formatted recent work, Imagining Sculpture: A Short Conjectural History. On the surface, Abe’s book is the culmination of the author’s inquiry into the birth of “sculpture” as an aesthetic category in China during the modern era. Here, and in research preceding this publication, Abe has offered a rich historical and historiographical account of the cross-cultural encounters that led to the birth of modern artistic and art historical inquiry into the category of sculpture—specifically Buddhist sculpture—in East Asia. Perhaps more importantly… Full Review

Broadly speaking, both the sciences and archaeological fieldwork are often fueled by the search for discoveries that provide new, inescapable points of reference. By contrast, the canonical narrative of art history isn’t designed to be reshaped periodically by fresh discoveries. Instead, classic major monuments continue to delineate the canonical narrative, originally chosen to best represent the standard model for the development of medieval art and architecture. Over the past several decades a variety of thematic studies have been incorporated to reframe such narratives, adding topics such as patronage, labor, use, materiality, and sensory studies. These new contexts have largely nuanced… Full Review

In Nakahira Takuma’s photobook For a Language to Come [Kitarubeki botoba no tame ni] (1970), a haunting diptych of photographs conveys flat, endless tire-track-covered sand that stretches out to a dark horizon under a blotted sky, as if capturing a terrain in the midst of battle. Art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki sensitively unpacks this image taken in 1965 on a human-made island in Tokyo Bay, to reveal the layers of horror and modernity that undergird its spectral form. The island was created from developmental desires both to dredge the bay of Tokyo to allow for the transit of larger vessels… Full Review

Curator and academic James Voorhies’s book Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial asks how contemporary art exhibitions produce new knowledge when the modes of production surrounding these events have developed in complexity. Exhibitions now extend far beyond the gallery to include their broadcast on social media, publications of varying forms, and public programs (both in-person and virtual) surrounding these events. For Voorhies, this means that audiences now combine—and, crucially, expect—both sensual and cognitive experiences with art in order to learn and digest its content. Yet, traditional aesthetics still prioritizes the value of the viewer’s sensual experience with the… Full Review

Keith Haring’s journals (Penguin Books, 2010) open with the nineteen-year-old burgeoning artist hitchhiking across the Midwest. Before he moved to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, the kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania followed the Grateful Dead, selling t-shirts, getting high, and seeing the country. In Minnesota he found a tree by the St. Croix River that he was “gonna come back to, someday” (2). After the Dead show in Minneapolis, he and his companion hitched a ride and ate in a bar on the North Dakota border surrounded by farmers who commented on Haring’s hair when he… Full Review