Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, eds.
Exh. cat. Minneapolis, Minn.: Walker Art Center, 2007. 272 pp.; 429 color ills.; 466 b/w ills. Paper $39.95 (9780935640892)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 4, 2007–February 17, 2008
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 as a frightening vision of a consumerist future; thirty years later he concluded that the world was approximating Brave New World much faster than he anticipated. In his satirical and sinister novel, warfare and poverty have been eliminated, but also family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. In their place, Soma, a powerful drug provided by the “World State,” is taken to escape reality through hallucinatory fantasies. Decades later, in the context of a new century, Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, two assistant curators at the Walker Art Center, titled… Full Review
December 12, 2007
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Ellen P. Conant, ed.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. 312 pp.; 15 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $54.00 (0824829379)
To adapt John Donne’s famous phrase, no art form is an island, and Ellen Conant aims to confirm this by connecting the relatively isolated art-historical landmasses of the Edo period (1615–1868) and the Meiji period (1868–1912) via a volume of essays focused primarily on the time period 1840–90. Her purpose is to elucidate Meiji arts as part of a continuum of artistic experimentation and innovation during the nineteenth century. In her introduction, Conant asks readers to seek the essays’ “fundamental commonality” (2). These shared themes include an examination of novel art forms in the mid-nineteenth century, a consideration… Full Review
December 12, 2007
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Kathryn A. Smith
London and Toronto: British Library in association with University of Toronto Press, 2003. 384 pp.; 8 color ills.; 145 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9780802086914)
The book of hours emerged from its union with the psalter at the very end of the thirteenth century like ripe fruit dropping off a tree, to use Victor Leroquais’s famous simile. Six independent English horae from before 1300 are cited in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles; twenty-one others span the 1300s (Nigel Morgan Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1982 and 1988; and Lucy Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1986). From this wealth of early English material, Kathryn Smith has selected three personally commissioned books… Full Review
December 5, 2007
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Jyoti Hosagrahar
New York: Routledge, 2005. 256 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $165.00 (9780415323758)
Delhi today is the capital of the nation state of India, and many think of it as the capital of much of India since the late twelfth century, when Muslim political authority established itself in north India. This is, of course, an oversimplification, for there were periods when Delhi was not the capital of any particular regime. All the same, the city has captured the imagination of a number of scholars working on South Asia. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, adds to the already rich literature on Delhi by probing the intersection between colonial authority… Full Review
November 29, 2007
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Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006. 185 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780719067846)
The title page of Louis Huart’s 1841 Physiologie du flâneur shows two fashionable women walking side by side while a man behind them has stopped on the pavement in order to stare intently at them. The female faces betray their hesitancy as they draw near to each other. The male figure, whose facial features are obliterated, communicates his confidence by the swagger of his pose as he leans jauntily on his walking-stick, a haughty Van Dyck type transposed to the pavements of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. This male walker and observer, the flâneur as social type, has received the majority of critical… Full Review
November 28, 2007
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In 1936, for the cover of the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue, Alfred Barr famously created a flowchart of modernist movements fueling his two chosen strains of non-geometrical and geometrical abstraction. Barr’s recasting of history, which left out not only those modernist movements that did not fit his formalist history but also any mention of the contexts behind their success might be described as an example of what Van Wyck Brooks termed a “usable past.” In his 1918 essay appearing under that phrase, Brooks rejected the literary history of his day as the product of… Full Review
November 28, 2007
Steve Edwards
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 368 pp.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $97.95 (9780271027134)
Joanne Lukitsh
London: Phaidon, 2006. 128 pp.; 56 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (071484618X)
The topic of photography presently affords an excellent case study in the changing styles, methods, and presumptions of art-historical practice. Once a new and marginal offshoot of a very traditional field, photography has become solidly entrenched within the new art histories, in part because the photographic medium lends itself so congenially to many contemporary theoretical preoccupations. At the same time, more traditional catalogues raisonnés, exhibition catalogues, and monographs devoted to the work of renowned photographers are being published. The history of photography is thus at a crossroad—or, rather, a fruitful zone of hybridity. Though occasionally productive of dialogic gaps between… Full Review
November 27, 2007
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“Public history” is a well-established and familiar sub-discipline to students of history. Many universities offer degrees and concentrations in this or a related field. Historians who train in public scholarship expect to pursue work in places where a relatively broad audience encounters the past, including national parks and monuments, historic houses, and museums. As public historians, they pursue research and author historical materials. They may be involved in curating exhibitions, directing educational programs, and advocating for historic preservation, among other, more general administrative duties. Fundamentally, their job is to interpret history for a range of audiences, and to mediate between… Full Review
November 27, 2007
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Fiona J. Griffiths
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 412 pp.; 18 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780812239607)
Herrad of Hohenbourg's Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg's Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript's author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine… Full Review
November 21, 2007
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Robin Kelsey
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 286 pp.; 89 b/w ills. Cloth $52.00 (9780520249356)
Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review
November 20, 2007
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Eleanor P. DeLorme, ed.
Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. 208 pp.; 125 color ills.; 23 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (0892368012)
The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review
November 15, 2007
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Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and Christina Buley-Uribe
London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007. 440 pp.; 373 ills. Cloth $34.95 (0500238359)
Catherine Lampert and Antoinette Le Normand-Romain
Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006. 320 pp.; 370 color ills. Cloth $85.00 (9781903973660)
Exhibition schedule: Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 23, 2006–January 1, 2007; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, February 9–May 13, 2007
Auguste Rodin enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Great Britain, relishing the company of admiring patrons and fellow artists and exhibiting his work to laudatory reviews. Shortly before his death, he donated eighteen sculptures to the state—the only such donation he made during his lifetime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the British have honored his work in grand retrospectives, including two organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1970 and 1986. In the fall of 2006, the Royal Academy of Arts continued the British romance with Rodin, mounting a new comprehensive… Full Review
November 15, 2007
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Joseph J. Rishel
Exh. cat. Philadelphia and New Haven: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2006. 592 pp.; 431 color ills.; 45 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300120036)
Exhibition schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, banner-titled “Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros,” September 20–December 31, 2006; Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, Revelaciones, subtitled Las Artes in América Latina, 1492–1820, February 6–June 30, 2007; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, August 1–October 28, 2007
In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review
October 31, 2007
Victoria C. Gardener Coates and Jon L. Seydl
Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2007. 304 pp.; 50 color ills.; 70 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780892368723)
Susan Weber Soros, ed.
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 688 pp.; 500 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $110.00 (9780300117134)
Exhibition schedule: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York, November 16, 2006–February 18, 2007; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 15–June 24, 2007
Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of… Full Review
October 30, 2007
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Alexander Nehamas
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp.; 8 color ills.; 79 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (0691095213)
This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings. Historical highlights are amply celebrated as Nehamas explores the place of beauty in… Full Review
October 30, 2007
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