Recently Published Reviews

Marcia Hall has written a brave book that is even more sweeping in scope than the list of names in the subtitle suggests. Indeed, the first half of the book discusses the Council of Trent, fifteenth-century Florentine religious painting, the Venetian use of oil paint, the Reformation, Leonardo, Giorgione, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mannerism, and Roman painting at the end of the century. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, however, is not a survey, but a lucid argument, focusing on a few examples over this broad swathe of Renaissance art in order to explore a question of signal… Full Review

“To the Romans I assign no limit of things nor of time. To them I have given empire without end” (Aeneid, 1.278). So Virgil’s Zeus prophesized to Aeneas, encapsulating the myth of Rome’s divinely sanctioned and immortal imperium (power, authority, and sovereignty) that inspired and was exploited by centuries of later rulers, popes, nobles, humanists, and others. Rome’s imperium—how it was expressed by its ancient ruins and fragments and who could possess it during the Renaissance—forms the central theme in Kathleen Wren Christian’s book. Christian examines the cultural phenomenon of antiquities collecting in Rome during the early… Full Review

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review

During the past decade, humanities scholars have brought increased attention to the cultural and affective practices that, along with political philosophies, legal policies, and social efforts to ameliorate suffering, comprise international human rights discourse. Given this challenge to the disciplinary dominance of the social sciences as well as broad media publicity surrounding atrocities in the twentieth century, it is notable that attention has been paid only recently to issues of visuality. New publications such as Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review) and Wendy Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights… Full Review

Few building types evoke more compelling insights into the relationship among architecture, nationalism, and modernity than the museum. Alice Tseng’s The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan is a thoughtful, nuanced book that illuminates how notions of national identity were shaped and reinforced through architectural form and aesthetic display in the new institution of the art museum in modern Japan. Tseng examines the development of the four national museums of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan as part of the larger story of the birth of the museum as a key institution of modernity. According to Tseng, these museums were “sites of constructed… Full Review

The “Exposures” series published by Reaktion Books highlights the relationship of photography to realms national, disciplinary, material, and metaphysical. Thus far the series includes books on photography and Australia, Japan, Italy, Ireland, the United States, archaeology, anthropology, literature, science, cinema, flight, spirit, and death. Although the topics suggest a refreshingly global approach to the history of photography, the two books under review here, Photography and Africa by Erin Haney and Photography and Egypt by Maria Golia, illuminate the Western bias of the series. The first title shoehorns all of Africa’s fifty-four plus nations (including Egypt) into one rather… Full Review

The need for an investigation of Auguste Rodin’s influence on American artists was spawned at the 2002 symposium, “New Studies on Rodin,” held on the occasion of the publication of Albert Elsen’s monumental catalogue of Stanford’s Rodin Collection. How did American artists adopt, adapt, or reject Rodin’s art? What were the attributes in their work that reflected the master’s oeuvre? Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center was the ideal place for this study, with the third largest Rodin collection in the world, including two hundred works—mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta--on view in three galleries and… Full Review

The frame, as object and concept, has attracted a fair amount of attention in recent years. Art historians, in particular, have explored the multiple (sometimes competing and conflicting) roles of the frame: its ability to draw attention to and away from the center; its capacity to open up or close in space; its efficacy as a visual or verbal sign; its status as a permanent or ornamental “supplement”; its formal and thematic relations to thresholds, such as windows and portals, to name but a few. Oleg Tarasov’s Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich engages all these aspects of… Full Review

In his latest book, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris writes with genuine gusto: “It is often said that seeing is believing. But we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around” (93). While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy. They attest to the… Full Review

In his preface to Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099–1291, Jaroslav Folda asserts that the story of the art of the Crusaders is far less well-known than their history: “To tell the story of Crusader Art adequately,” Folda writes, “a richly illustrated book is required” (11). This slim but sumptuously illustrated volume fulfills that requirement. It is, in many ways, an encapsulation of Folda’s scholarly oeuvre in that it presents a survey of the most significant works of art produced in the Holy Land between Crusader conquests of Jerusalem in 1099 and the… Full Review

In her brilliant and lavishly illustrated new book on the history of wall painting in Europe from 1927 to 1957, Romy Golan’s subject is artworks specifically designed for architectural installation. Although there are several monographs about mural paintings by individual artists, or by groups of artists within a single national context, few historians have investigated how wall painting played out across many different countries during this period, and none have brought Golan’s innovative and rigorous brand of scholarship to the topic. Concentrating on France and Italy, but looking across to Spain, the United Kingdom, the Americas, and India, Golan’s study… Full Review

The New Museum’s exhibition Ostalgia represents one of the largest North American exhibitions of art from the areas of former Soviet influence, both in regional (countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union or Soviet satellites, as well as ones that did not fit into either of these categories) and historical breadth (1991 is the key moment, although included works span from the 1960s to the present). Drawing its title from a term adopted in Germany in the 1990s that came to refer to the fetishization of objects from everyday life in East Germany under Soviet influence (the term’s pun derives… Full Review

The disciplinary diversity of this conference, including contributions from scholars of art, archaeology, literature, history, and others, proved to be more than just a veneer. Organizers Andrew Marsham and Alain George (both from the University Edinburgh), together with fourteen other scholars, applied their wide-ranging expertise to various dimensions of the Umayyad period. The work of these scholars was divided into eight panels of two papers each: “Rulership in the Late Antique Context,” “Sacred Art,” “Christians and Muslims,” “Papyri and Social History,” “Historiography,” “Land Tenure and the Economy,” “The ‘Desert Castles,’” and “The Umayyads in Modern Times.” By and large, the… Full Review

Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from its founding in 1949 to his eclipse from power in 1971, is hardly a household name in art history. He rarely appears in art-history texts as much more than a background figure. At most, he is referenced as the head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]) and the man who built the East German state and its repressive bureaucratic apparatus. So it may come as some surprise for art historians, even those who specialize in postwar German art, to discover that Ulbricht played a fairly influential… Full Review

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a surprisingly varied display of the artist’s exploration in process, the body, objectness, and architecture. Divided among the museum’s two fourth-floor wings, the retrospective flows chronologically. The first wing showcases some of Serra’s early small sculptures, several films, the residue of a sculptural performance, and drawings. The curators have dedicated the second wing solely to his mature drawings. The central staircase that divides the two wings creates a slightly awkward flow, and I initially walked through the exhibition backwards and almost missed the first segment… Full Review