Recently Published Reviews

Ann Jensen Adams begins her book by observing that seventeenth-century Dutch portraits were displayed in a wide variety of contexts; they were “everywhere.” While it would be hyperbolic to declare scholarly studies of early modern portraiture to be everywhere, the last few decades have indeed witnessed an expansion of interest, notably in the portraiture of Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Adams’s book follows the tendency of recent scholars to shift scrutiny away from considerations of style and mimesis, and toward socio-cultural context and viewer response. Yet there is no book on Dutch portraiture quite like Adams’s in the breadth… Full Review

Spain’s Museo del Prado has begun to pay attention to the nineteenth century. Such welcome interest first became evident in 2007, when an ambitious expansion provided space for a comprehensive introduction to The Nineteenth Century in the Prado, an exhibition and catalogue that documented some ninety-five seldom-displayed works from the museum’s collection (click here for review). Sorolla, 1863–1923, an exhibition of 102 paintings by Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla, follows on this success and stands, one hopes, as one of many shows that will bring nineteenth-century Spanish painting to the attention of art historians outside the Peninsula… Full Review

It is nothing new that an exhibition catalogue, such as this one from the Prado, proves to be of academic importance. However, in the field of Golden Age Spanish Art Studies over recent decades a number of catalogues have served as landmarks signalling substantial advances in the understanding of the social, intellectual, and cultural significance of Spanish paintings and sculptures. The genre’s multifaceted approach articulated through a range of essays permits a deeper interdisciplinary study of artworks by a range of scholars. An excellent example of this is another volume accompanying a recent Prado exhibition, the 2007 Velázquez's Fables: Mythology… Full Review

Scholars will be grateful for the meticulous analysis in Cordula Grewe’s Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, which demonstrates that “any real understanding of European art’s development in the nineteenth century must involve an understanding of the Nazarene movement” (1). In 1809, an overtly Catholic group in Vienna, consisting of Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and four companions, founded the Lucasbund, the Brotherhood of St. Luke. By 1810, the comrades were in Rome and lodged in the former Franciscan cloister of San Isidoro, secularized during Napoleon’s occupation. Others joined them: Peter Cornelius in 1812, Wilhelm Schadow in… Full Review

Where is the discourse now about race and power in museums? More than twenty years ago, the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution set the terms of the debate when it hosted two conferences on “the presentation and interpretation of diversity in museums.” The resulting publications, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Karp, Lavine, and Christine Mullen Kreamer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,1992), brought together papers by curators, anthropologists,… Full Review

The Victorian photocollage, pictured so richly in the plates of this book, is whimsical and more than a little strange. Pasted portraits cut from cartes de visite adorn everything from hand-drawn spider webs, to playing cards, to oddly scaled watercolor tableaux of drawing rooms with out-of-whack perspectives. They first read as interior fantasies, surreal Victorian curiosities—fascinating but illegible. As curator Elizabeth Siegel puts it, “Victorian photocollage . . . suffers the double indignity of being the product of both industrial production and feminine craft” (14). Gender and technique place Victorian photocollage on the margins of modernist narratives of photographic history… Full Review

The catalogues for two collaborative exhibitions of African textiles on view in the fall of 2009—one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University—bear striking similarities, at least in outward appearances. Comparable in length, they each feature essays and a selection of illustrated artworks with accompanying page-length captions. They also draw on similar phrases, such as “Poetics of Cloth,” which is both the title of the Grey Art Gallery catalogue and of Alisa LaGamma’s essay in the one accompanying the Met’s exhibition. There is even an overlap in the contemporary textile… Full Review

Martha Langford’s Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums analyzes forty-one photographic albums compiled between 1860 and 1960, now in the McCord Museum of Canadian History. They are ordinary albums, a mixture of commercial and amateur photographs of places and people, none especially famous, preserved because of their relevance to Canadian social history. Some are “accompanied by lists, genealogies, clippings, and personal letters that place the albums in a familial context” (6), while others have only a few names inscribed on the pages. All of them, however, seem soaked in intimacy and affection, even if the scarcity of… Full Review

The writing of James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition James Barry (1741–1806): ‘The Great Historical Painter’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays… Full Review

Evelyn Welch’s fascinating Shopping in the Renaissance, now in its second printing, has garnered glowing reviews and awards in the five years since its first appearance. I will not go against this well-deserved tide of opinion; instead (and at the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned), I want to consider how the book intersects with art history and where it might be most useful to students of art. Although Shopping in the Renaissance is beautifully illustrated with images of paintings, prints, and other crafted objects, its subject encompasses shopping for all sorts of things. Indeed, it is striking how little… Full Review

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn rewarded patient, introspective viewers with a revelatory experience. Organized by curators Donna De Salvo and Carter E. Foster (of the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Mark Godfrey (of the Tate Modern), this mid-career retrospective compiled three decades of the artist’s quietly enigmatic and provocative photographs, sculptures, drawings, and books. The greatest strength of the exhibition’s recent incarnation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), was the rich dialogue developed between the artwork and its site, the ICA’s magnificent waterfront location. The most challenging aspect of the ICA installation was the relative lack of… Full Review

Tucked away in a Nuremberg archive, sixty-one letters have survived as a unique testament concerning the life of a sixteenth-century Birgittine nun. Writing from the pastoral setting of a south German convent called Maria Mai during the years 1517–1533, Katerina Lemmel maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin Hans Imhoff. Imhoff, a wealthy businessman and Nuremberg patrician, was charged with shepherding Lemmel’s financial affairs during her years of monastic withdrawal. These affairs were surprisingly complex because Lemmel was continually requesting funds in order to improve life at her institution. Only the letters written by Lemmel have survived, not those sent… Full Review

The reign and artistic patronage of Philip III of Spain are often overlooked, lost in the long shadows cast by Philip II and Philip IV, and by El Escorial and Diego Velázquez. Yet, Philip III reigned for nearly a quarter of a century and was a significant patron of the arts. Lisa Banner’s The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598–1621 sheds a powerful new light on Philip III and Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, and in the process illuminates an important period of royal artistic patronage in early Baroque Spain. With great skill… Full Review

As a measure of the critical changes in scholarship in the field of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism over the last two decades, the revised edition of the catalogue of the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that first appeared in 1989 is disappointing. If consulted in order to check the recent bibliography on one of the paintings, or to get a decent catalogue entry with revised dating and, in some cases, revised attribution and/or scientific examination, accompanied by an excellent color reproduction, the volume is satisfactory. Fifty-five entries on works by some eighteen artists is not a bad deal… Full Review

This compilation of essays comprises the most recent scholarly publication devoted to the eleventh-century embroidery housed in Bayeux and reveals new interpretations and innovative approaches. The essays address, often through a theoretical scope, issues pertaining to gender, authority, materiality, patronage, performativity, and the senses. Before continuing, however, a critical statement must be made concerning semantics and the ascribed title of this celebrated work of art. The editors note in the introduction that some of the contributors to the volume maintain the usage of the term “Bayeux Tapestry,” while other authors, namely Madeline Caviness and Karen Eileen Overbey, have opted to… Full Review