Recently Published Reviews

This beautifully illustrated catalogue, companion to the 2009–10 exhibition curated by Carole McNamara at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor), brings together several eminent scholars of nineteenth-century art and photography to consider questions of influence. We have often heard about the Dutch and English sources that helped spur the nineteenth-century French vogue for painting seascapes, but what about the influence of photography? The Lens of Impressionism explores the idea that photography presented new pictorial modes for representing the Normandy view. Its five authors pursue implications and explications of how painters were inspired to adopt some of those… Full Review

Six years into the afterlife of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), two of his U.S. academic publishers have excavated texts that have photography as their major point of focus, and they have published these pronouncements posthumously. While Copy, Archive, Signature reads as a wide-ranging conversation about a variety of important topics concerning “photography in deconstruction” (to recite the subtitle of editor Gerhard Richter’s astute introduction), Athens, Still Remains is a slim volume that takes the images of the contemporary French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme as a springboard for a larger meditation on photography and its relation to death. The conversation was conducted… Full Review

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is Michael Camille’s long-awaited last book, published seven years after the author’s untimely death in 2002. By that time, the text must have been finished, since the preface is signed: “Paris, February 2001”; the editor indicates that only some of the citations in the footnotes remained incomplete (379). Throughout Camille’s brilliant career he was interested in medieval image making, paying equal attention to “high” and “low” art, a distinction which he identified as a modern construct. Modernity’s shaping influence on perceptions of the Middle Ages was therefore always an important aspect of Camille’s work, as… Full Review

Islamic archaeology is an unusual area of enquiry because as a term it embraces a religious and cultural element as well as an empirical-scientific component. Of course the same could be said of many branches of archaeology, though in present times the use of the term “Islamic” carries with it specific connotations of ideology, belief, ethnicity, and culture. Specifically, the term may be taken to indicate a particular Islamic ideological approach to the practice and study of archaeology. Alternatively, the term may be used in a more neutral sense to indicate the study of Islamic culture, including religion through the… Full Review

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2). The thesis… Full Review

Following an efflorescence of critical work on the subject over the last twenty-five years, the European Grand Tour has emerged as a focus of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. The significance of ancient and Renaissance art to the Grand Tour itinerary—together with the emergence of modern display practices and attendant opportunities for the exercise of aesthetic judgment—have conspired to guarantee the Grand Tour's special appeal to art historians. The subject's enduring interest is surely also due to the fact that it has proven especially fertile ground for art history's disciplinary move toward thinking beyond national borders. The Grand Tour was founded on… Full Review

The necessary precondition for a world art history is the close study of cultural exchanges. Even nowadays, when you can travel from New York to Beijing in less than a day, the distance between America’s and China’s visual cultures is still immense. When such travel was much slower, and curators were not much concerned with exotic art, the diverse artistic traditions were relatively self-sufficient. But once Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the globe, it was inevitable that those artifacts called works of art would move from their places of origin to other cultures. The world had become one, which is to… Full Review

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty was an extensive retrospective composed of over 150 works created by the artist over the last 45 years. To access this exhibition on the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA) campus, I walked through the Ahmanson Building, past EATLACMA, by the contemporary LA artist collective Fallen Fruit, down a set of stairs to cross beneath Smoke, Tony Smith’s soaring hexagonal 1967 sculpture, which quite literally fills the atrium. Exiting that building I walked out onto an outdoor pavilion still under construction, which, I noticed rather ironically, is called the BP Grand Entrance… Full Review

Physicists are poised to articulate a historic “theory of everything” that will tie together gravity, light, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up the universe as merely different manifestations of the same essential subatomic reality. Mark Dion is that rarest of artists whose body of work is arguing for a parallel aesthetic breakthrough: the revelation that not only are sculpture, painting, drawing, and the rest accepted forms of contemporary art, but so too are activities like historical research, interventions, publications, performances, relational aesthetics, collaboration, pedagogy, institutional critique, natural history, anthropology, cultural detritus, and satire, to name just… Full Review

At the outset of this monumental study Margot Fassler takes pains to position herself in relation to Chartes’s “major industry,” the making of history. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, she takes as axiomatic that history is akin to a performance, thoroughly informed by the cultural system in which it is produced (most recently, see Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History, 1000–1500: Art, Music, History, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010; this volume includes a contribution by Fassler). During the Middle Ages, she argues, the liturgical and visual arts often played a key role in this process… Full Review

The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name held at the Middlebury College Museum of Art and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2009. As Richard Saunders, the director of Middlebury’s museum, explains, the exhibition was inspired by the museum’s acquisition in 2005 of a panel painting by the Florentine painter Lippo d’Andrea (ca. 1370–1451) of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari (cat. 4). Such acquisitions and exhibitions of historic art are particularly important for colleges and universities to… Full Review

The 2009 American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) conference on “New Darshans: Seeing Southern Asian Religiosity and Visuality Across Disciplines” was wide in scope and interest: it featured thirty-five papers; covered periods from the second century B.C.E. to today; and focused on geographic areas from Rajasthan to Bengal, from Tibet and Himachal Pradesh to Tamilnad, and included Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Chattisgarh, and even areas outside the subcontinent like Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, and the United States. “New darshans” were investigated through a stunning array of media: stūpa slabs; caves; temples, and their walls and pillars; relics; images; ivories; pilgrimage… Full Review

For most people, the familiar poster of Barack Obama with the caption, “HOPE,” introduced them to the work of the street artist and graphic designer, Shepard Fairey. This unofficial poster, which resulted from Fairey’s grassroots efforts, provoked a well-publicized lawsuit by the Associated Press over Fairey’s use of a copyrighted photograph by Mannie Garcia as the basis for the red-white-and-blue image of Obama on his poster. This poster, the same image slightly changed for the cover of Time magazine’s person-of-the-year issue (December 29, 2008), as well as Obama’s letter of February 22, 2008, thanking Fairey for his support, were included… Full Review

It is somehow appropriate that I began writing this review on a plane. In an attempt to squeeze in a few extra productive hours between a busy conference and a hectic end of the semester, I resort to technology: not just the jet engine that propels me across the continent at the speed of over four hundred mph, but also the netbook computer and the available on-board internet, which allow me to instantly access my notes stored on a distant hard drive. It is an exhilarating experience, but it is also exhausting, as I cannot but long for the days… Full Review

Two new books on Michelangelo Buonarroti explore his life and work from different yet complementary vantage points. With Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times, William Wallace offers a new biography that aims to present a balanced portrait to counter persistent characterizations of the artist as “an isolated, tortured genius, with few friends, an unappreciative family, and impossibly demanding patrons” (7). To this end, Wallace relies heavily on Michelangelo’s correspondence, professional records, and poetry as well as letters written among family members and friends and related documents including contracts, accounting records, and the highly influential biographies by Ascanio… Full Review