Recently Published Reviews

There are far too few general books available on topics in Japanese art, and those who are intrepid enough to write them are insufficiently applauded for the difficult task. Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 is an excellent example of an overview of Japanese Buddhist art done exceedingly well. It does a laudable job of surveying Japanese Buddhist arts from the early modern period continuing into the present, discussing an important body of visual materials that until now has been largely overlooked. The intention of the book, Patricia Graham states, is to “suggest new directions for research and… Full Review

Scholarly texts, from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) to Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), have played a pivotal role in theorizing culture, and specifically art, as a means by which to withstand and overcome the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernity in the West. In the past decade, the field of East Asian Studies has found itself undergoing a much-needed methodological shift whereby the intersection between culture, the economy, and nationalist politics is carefully analyzed. Through works that weave historical narratives with critical theory, such as Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity… Full Review

Although most of his works normally reside in Florentine museums and his role as a proponent of the maniera in sculpture is well-known, Vincenzo Danti (1530–76) is finally being feted with an exhibition of his own. On view at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence through September 7, I grandi bronzi del Battistero: L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo is the schizophrenic title for what is essentially a monographic show on the career of the artist. Its occasion is the restoration of a three-figure bronze group from the southern door of the Florentine Baptistery, but the show and… Full Review

The current, straightforwardly titled Frida Kahlo retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center and traveling to Philadelphia and San Francisco, follows two unrelated but identically titled surveys of the same artist—one organized by the Tate Modern (2005) and another, more hastily put together, at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2007), each with unique, well-illustrated catalogues. While the shows in Mexico and the United States were explicitly tied to the centennial of Kahlo’s 1907 birth, the Tate version seems to have been conceptualized as the best way to get British audiences excited about Latin American art… Full Review

This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was… Full Review

Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively… Full Review

Enthusiasts of early twentieth-century American art have long recognized George Bellows’s facility for powerful draftsmanship, yet his energetic, even boisterous, paintings and lithographs remain appreciably better known than his drawings. The artist made hundreds of original works on paper, largely black and white, now hidden in museums and private collections across the country. Their broad dispersal may account, in part, for the limited scholarly attention paid this fascinating aspect of the artist’s work. The exhibition The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library begins to redress this lacuna by showcasing works from one of the key… Full Review

First, a disclaimer. Throughout my art-history education, which began in the 1960s and was probably typical, pre-twentieth-century sculpture was evaluated much as it had been since the Renaissance, which is to say in formal terms, the purity of its planes and contours competing with painting’s reliance on surface and color. I came to know, at least intellectually, that perceptions and judgments are indelibly affected by the conventions and values of our time, and assumed that, in the objective spirit in which art historians are taught to approach works of art, I would adjust gracefully to new evidence requiring shifts in… Full Review

These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries)… Full Review

The curators of Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008 have gathered an impressive collection of well-known objects from Europe and the United States to showcase the curving beauty of the eighteenth-century Rococo and of later designs with similarly sinuous lines. The show was mounted by members of the Cooper-Hewitt curatorial staff, including Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, and Ellen Lupton, with Penelope Hunter-Stiebel as a guest curator. The focus is on the formal elements of the Rococo, demonstrating the historical persistence of sculptural curves across media and through space and time. The exhibition consists of a roughly chronological display of… Full Review

When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu… Full Review

Only seven years after their resplendent pioneering exhibition and catalogue on the seventeenth-century Japanese artist Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), Felice Fischer, Kyoko Kinoshita, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art produced an even more magnificent catalogue and exhibition on the artists Ike (also known as Ikeno and Ike no) Taiga (1723–76) and Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727/28–1784). Like Kōetsu, who was himself a calligrapher, potter, and lacquer-ware artist, Gyokuran and her husband Taiga were stylistic and social pioneers who worked in several arts, in their case painting, calligraphy, poetry, and even seal-carving and lacquer, in the style called Nanga. One of several… Full Review

What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end… Full Review

Perhaps most famous in art history as Antonio Moro, a name he assumed while portraitist for the Spanish court of King Philip II, Anthonis Mor enjoyed a long career in the Netherlands, chiefly around his native Utrecht. In this extensive analytical study, Joanna Woodall restores to the painter his full career, including a serious output of religious subjects. Indeed, Woodall’s perceptive characterizations sometimes seem colored by a portentous wish to convey the ultimate seriousness and salvific purpose of his vocation. If Christian content enjoys extensive attention here, it arose with Mor’s origins, for he was a “disciple” (Woodall’s word,… Full Review

Collectors, it sometimes seems, are a necessary evil. Artists create, and we art writers explain the significance of what they make. But collectors, who usually are privileged people, mostly only pick up the check. Too often they treat art as a form of speculation, and so are ready to resell when its value increases. And many of them are not shy about hustling for tips. As a dealer explained to me over dinner, after the newly rich purchase their houses and yacht, they come to his gallery to get their art. Well, they have to do something with their money… Full Review