Recently Published Reviews

Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs… Full Review

Charmaine Nelson has produced an important book framing American Neoclassical sculpture within nineteenth-century discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. She explores the ways in which the intersecting categories of “blackness” and “femininity” are socially, politically, culturally, and psychically constructed in and through the representational practices of ideal statuary. As a black feminist scholar, Nelson wants to “render [her] methodological apparatus” transparent and is committed to pursuing a methodology that explores “race and racial signification as inextricable from sex and gender signification” (xvi, xxi). It is only recently that British, Canadian, and U.S. art historians have looked afresh at… Full Review

Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects). The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s… Full Review

The Kimbell Museum’s Masterpiece Series introduces select works from the museum’s permanent collection to an audience both lay and specialist. As part of this series, Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop perfectly blends the often neglected art of careful connoisseurship with a wealth of visual and historical context. There is far more than one would suspect in the brief eighty-six-page text as Smith examines the silver-gilt Kimbell Virgin in exacting detail. He produces a rich visual analysis that explains technical production and describes the training and working methods… Full Review

This past February, French President Nicolas Sarkozy aroused international controversy by revising the national school curriculum, requiring every fifth-grade student to “adopt” one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust by learning their story. The plan drew wide-ranging criticism for its pedagogical insensitivity and political opportunism. The terms in which Sarkozy framed his proposal––expressly affirming Judeo-Christian values––were especially inflammatory, given the traditional secularism of French governance and the intensity of ongoing debate around the politics of Islam. Less attention was devoted to a new German program in which middle-school classes will study the Holocaust using The Search… Full Review

An 1870 satirical cartoon from the journal Paris-Caprice depicts an artist, palette in hand, painting directly onto his female subject’s skin. Conflating the two meanings of “painting a face,” the artist eliminates the need for a canvas. Tamar Garb finds this spoof central to understanding the complex intersection of social, psychological, and symbolic factors involved in painted portraits. In The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914, she suggests that the metaphorical relationship between applying makeup to a face and paint to canvas provides a useful key to analyzing the superficiality and artifice found in oil paintings of… Full Review

As everyone who studies and loves the art of Rubens knows, the essential challenge posed by his work is a tension between the colorful, dynamic sensuality of his figures and the abstract concepts they often represent. Lisa Rosenthal’s ambitious, beautifully wrought study reveals that this tension is not only Rubens’s deliberate project but an especially fruitful one. In a felicitously tight structure, Rosenthal concentrates on just five paintings: four political and mythological works and a family self-portrait. She offers bold yet extraordinarily subtle and sympathetic readings of the pictures and other related images, marshaling semiotics, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches in… Full Review

“Is it real?” asks a French journalist as reported by contributing author, Howard Morphy, in the third section of the Museum Frictions anthology. She is watching a ceremonial performance by Yolngu people at the opening of the new National Museum of Australia in 2001 (489). Such a question, or the more pointed variation “What is real in a museum?” underlies the whole of this extensive (almost daunting) volume. It is a question that has already been addressed in the two books that precede it in the same series, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Durham: Duke University… Full Review

In the spring of 1944 the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters; it was the first time that modern Cuban art was presented in the international arena. Organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., with assistance from the Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre, the exhibition was a success with the public as well as the critics. Although limited to the work of only thirteen painters, Modern Cuban Painters remains a seminal moment in the history of Cuban art. Since then there have been over twenty exhibitions focused on Cuban art that have… Full Review

The story behind this unusual, revealing, and enjoyable exhibition and accompanying catalogue begins with the voyage, in May 2003, of a life-size painting, fifteen-feet across, of an exotic, two-ton beast. Rolled up in storage for a century and a half, this all-but-forgotten portrait of a celebrity rhinoceros arrived in Los Angeles that month from the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, in the former German Democratic Republic, to be conserved at the Getty Museum and readied for permanent exhibition back home in Schwerin. The voyage of the painting mirrors another, earlier voyage—that of the animal herself. Born in India and brought to… Full Review

Allan Antliff’s study of the relations between American art and what he identifies as anarchist beliefs and political activity between 1908 and the end of World War I is a fascinating and important contribution to a knowledge of the wider circumstances of artistic production in the United States during this period. In a historical narrative connected solidly to thematic analyses, Antliff deals alternatively with organizations of varying kinds as well as with individual artists that, together, constituted a thriving anarchist political “micro-culture” of conjoined artistic production and critical discourse. Despite some of the weaknesses in Antliff’s account (elements of which… Full Review

Gerald and Sara Murphy were admired—adored—by many of the best-known members of the transatlantic avant-garde in the 1920s. John Dos Passos, their frequent guest both in Paris and on the Riviera, wrote happily of being “entertained . . . with great elegance and a great deal of gin fizz.” For Fernand Léger, Gerald was “the only American painter in Paris.” F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to them; the novel’s protagonists, the Divers, were modeled on the Murphys. Perhaps the best indicator of the breadth of their sparkling circle is a souvenir menu from a party they threw… Full Review

Although not well known to the general public, the eighteenth-century French painter and draughtsman Gabriel de Saint-Aubin has long compelled specialists working on virtually every aspect of Parisian social and cultural life. His exuberant depictions took the form of drawings in chalk, ink, and watercolor, as well as etchings and a few oil paintings, while his subjects ranged over most aspects of the cultured world around him: social interaction both high and low; theater; royal ceremony; legal proceedings; portraiture; history; architecture and ornamental design; and the unique product for which he is best known, miniature depictions of other artists’ works… Full Review

Bernini pittore, the title of the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s painterly practice as well as of the accompanying catalogue, is a provocative reconstruction of this lesser-known aspect of the Baroque artist’s multidisciplinary career. Conceived and curated by Tomaso Montanari for the recently restored Palazzo Barberini in Rome, the comprehensive exhibit and catalogue offer a new monograph on Bernini’s painting under a purposely familiar title. Montanari’s version of “Bernini pittore” is preceded by two catalogue raissonnée of the same name: Luigi Grassi’s pioneering monograph, Bernini pittore (Rome: Danesi, 1945), and the recent book by Francesco Petrucci, Bernini… Full Review

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 (1996): 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment… Full Review