Recently Published Reviews

Beatrice Kitzinger’s book, The Cross, The Gospel, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age, examines the cross as both a concept and an image in northern Europe from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Her book is a welcome addition to the field of early medieval art history because of its innovative approach and because it considers many objects and artworks that have received little attention before now. Kitzinger includes a wealth of materials that have been previously neglected due to their apparently lower quality and artistic skill when compared to the higher-status illuminated productions that have… Full Review

How can one represent the unrepresentable? This question has been at the center of numerous artistic debates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, parallel to philosophical and semiotic discourses on memory and loss, gaps and erasures, voids and material traces that remain. Reflections on absence and the essence of nothing have enormous creative potential—a fact long recognized in modern and contemporary art—but, as Elina Gertsman argues in her book on lacunae in medieval books, are rarely made fruitful and systematically studied in medieval art. Gertsman aims to challenge the conventional notion of the horror vacui of Gothic decorative art, an… Full Review

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols’s study marks a fresh approach to Vitruvius’s De architectura (On Architecture, ca. 20s BCE). It is a revision of the author’s 2009 PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge, entitled Vitruvius and the Rhetoric of Display: Wall Painting, Domestic Architecture and Roman Self-Fashioning, whose arguments have been partly presented in other publications. In this important study, Nichols tackles the ten books of Vitruvius’s work on architecture to provide a systematic overview and comprehensive analysis of his authorial persona. She focuses on books six and seven to offer a deeper understanding of Vitruvius’s approach to houses… Full Review

By Her Hand, an exhibition cocurated by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer and Oliver Tostmann at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, brought together works by sixteen Italian women artists from 1500 to the late eighteenth century. Some of these artists are well known to art historians and increasingly to the broader public, particularly Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work was celebrated in a blockbuster monographic exhibition in 2020 at the National Gallery in London. Several others will likely be new to many: Roman printmaker Anna Maria Vaiani or Bolognese painter Ginevra Cantofoli, for instance. After the Wadsworth, the exhibition traveled to the Detroit Institute… Full Review

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has flung open its doors following the cultural doldrums that marked the past year with a lavish exhibition that is striking for both its narrative and content. Visitors who have followed every Fabergé display and publication since the landmark 1977 blockbuster at the V&A marking the queen’s silver jubilee, and even those most familiar with the latest scholarship, are challenged from the threshold of the gallery’s enfilade. Surprisingly, there is not an imperial egg in sight when we first enter. Instead, we are greeted by miniature models of the Russian imperial regalia, the diamond-set… Full Review

The year 2020–21 was a banner one for artist Lorraine O’Grady, who earned a long-overdue retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, published an edited volume of her writings, and saw the first scholarly monograph of her work, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language. In this book, Stephanie Sparling Williams offers a timely rejoinder to the artist’s historical neglect, situating O’Grady’s peripatetic practice in her longstanding investment in language—first as a writer, linguist, and translator, and then as an artist.  The book’s interpretive grounding in language—in its conceptual, communicative, and structural dimensions—offers an in-depth complement to… Full Review

August 2021 saw the opening of Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico—a leading art venue in the global contemporary Native art scene. The show was an unprecedented response by fifty-four Indigenous artists (twenty of them in the APY Art Collective, an Australian Indigenous group) to the impact on Native peoples and the environment of the nearly seventy-six years of the Atomic Age. The 3,500-square-foot exhibition, spread out over four galleries, is an interdisciplinary mixture of forms and genres, and includes sculpture, video installation, photography, collage, glasswork, metalwork… Full Review

In the thirty-six years between the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980 (1982) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift (2018), Black vernacular art from the southern United States became securely established within the “canon” of American art. Nellie May Rowe (1900–1982) was an abiding presence in these and other definitive exhibitions of that era. Viewers embraced her as a prolific visual poet who elevated the intimacies of domestic life to an angelic hierarchy of sublime memories, insightful portraiture, tenderly empathic tributes and elegies, and… Full Review

This book explores the use of Egyptian objects in the Italian peninsula during the Late Roman Republic (ca. 146–31 BCE) and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Rather than focusing on production and initial use, the author examines the longer-term use and display of objects, particularly how imports and spoils were curated and received in multiple media. Pearson is interested in the ways these objects were perceived as art; that is, how Romans collected and used Egyptian objects, and how they valued them. The book argues that Roman economics, religion, and understandings of the foreign created a multifaceted sense of luxury that… Full Review

Jane Jin Kaisen: Parallax Conjunctures, the first solo exhibition in the United States by the South Korean–born visual artist and filmmaker (Danish, b. 1980), presented three media works that uncover repressed histories of postwar Korea and its diaspora. Two video installations, The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010) and Sweeping the Forest Floor (2020), were presented on either side of the exhibition hall, and a photographic installation Apertures | Specters | Rifts (2016) was mounted in the center. Comprising an array of various historical references, political innuendos, and temporalities spanning the past hundred years, each work crafted a narrative… Full Review

Visitors facing the entrance to Envisioning Evil: “The Nazi Drawings” by Mauricio Lasansky are offered only one glimpse of what they can expect if they choose to enter: a decorated Nazi officer raises his arm in a Hitler salute while blood-like drops fall from his wrist and smear the page. On his head is a terrifying bestial skull that appears both fixed and projected on the man’s scalp. A close look reveals smudges, partial erasures, hard pencil strokes, and tears to the paper. This work is steeped in rage. Mauricio Lasansky’s (1914–2012) torment is on full display upon entering the… Full Review

The 1960s are often art historicized as a period when artists began to shift their practices away from materiality and toward forms of abstract thought. According to the economist-turned-art-historian Sophie Cras, it also turns out to have been a decade when financial abstraction came to the forefront, and not just for artists who suddenly found themselves flung from the garret into a boom market, but for the public as a whole, heralding a cultural obsession with inflation, speculation, and arbitrage. Across the Cold War West, and specifically in the France and United States explored by Cras, this was a time… Full Review

At a 1993 festival in Timisoara, four years after protests in the city sparked a nationwide revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his Romanian Communist Party, the artist Dan Perjovschi tattooed the word “Romania” on his left arm. Ten years later, in Removing Romania (2003), Perjovschi underwent laser treatment to erase the national label from his skin. This process, the artist explains, did not so much remove the ink as disperse its pigmented molecules throughout his body. Traces of Romania remained embedded in his cells and tissue, invisible but ever present. On the one hand, Perjovschi’s… Full Review

This pathbreaking volume features nineteen substantial research studies that burrow deep into individual examples of the physical, geographical, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and historical circumstances that led to the creation, appreciation, alteration, destruction, restoration, reassembly, and constant reinterpretation of sculpture produced in fifteenth-century Italy. While these essays are all clearly addressed to fellow Renaissance scholars, a remarkable twentieth essay, the introduction by coeditors Amy R. Bloch and Daniel M. Zolli, provides an overview of the field that is so highly accessible and original in the range of media and topics addressed that it should become standard reading for both advanced undergraduates… Full Review

In the past few decades, design history has productively turned toward investigations of gender. Partly as a result of this emphasis, proportionately little attention has been paid to issues of race in the United States. This lacuna has become painfully salient in the wake of the protests sparked across the nation following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020. Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design serves as a timely corrective. Integrating themes of race and gender—and noting their… Full Review