Recently Published Reviews

Published in 1832, Fanny Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans was a sensation in England and a scandal in the United States. Basing her remarks on observations she made during the two years she spent in Cincinnati, Trollope claimed that "in America that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of." The greatest difference between England and America, according to Trollope, was "the want of refinement." By all appearances, Cincinnati's aspiring middle class took Trollope's criticism to heart. Wendy Jean Katz argues that during the antebellum period Cincinnati artists participated "in… Full Review

What if every new biennale mattered? Take Belief, for instance, the inaugural Singapore effort, which opened in September 2006. Headed by Fumio Nanjo, the new director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Belief was curated by Nanjo and his three appointees: Roger McDonald, deputy director of Arts Initiative Tokyo; Sharmini Pereira, an independent curator based in London and Sri Lanka, and founder of Raking Leaves publishing; and Eugene Tan, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. The show was installed in over sixteen venues across town: from the National Museum to mosques, churches, and temples, from the defunct Tanglin… Full Review

One would think that by now gender studies would have made solid inroads into just about any artistic province. That is not, however, the case for Northern Renaissance art—and surprisingly so, considering the rich harvest its wonderful tradition of portraiture promises to yield. Andrea Pearson’s study is to be welcomed as one of the first to take up this task. Fluent with feminist theory’s non-essentialist, negotiated approach to gender and subscribing to the view that spirituality always is an embodied experience, Pearson is an excellent guide. Her aim is to demonstrate the “viability of gender methodologies” for the study of… Full Review

Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. Essays by Richard Armstrong, Stephanie Barron, Roberta Bernstein, Sara Cochran, Michel Draguet, Thierry de Duve, Pepe Karmel, Theresa Papanikolas, Noëllie Roussel, Dickran Tashjian, Lynn Zelevansky. Ghent and Los Angeles: Ludion and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006. 256 pp; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. $60.00 (cloth) (9055446211) The impetus behind the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the presence in the permanent collection of an iconic modernist painting, The Treachery of Images (1929), better known… Full Review

Recent years have witnessed a transformation of the field of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, as scholars have rejected a definition of the modern derived from French art, and investigated the specific contours of a British modernity and its visual modes. Tim Barringer has already played a significant role in this reappraisal , and his recent book, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, continues this conversation, making an important contribution both to the study of mid-Victorian visual culture and to the larger theoretical questions raised by recent scholars of Victorian art. The subject of … Full Review

At stake in this book are the very identity and stability of Byzantine art. Accustomed to understanding Byzantine art as a settled category, we often perceive this material culture as expressions of the powerful piety and pious power emanating from Constantinople. The authors of this book, however, perform a remarkable feat in undermining those perceptions to the point where new categories become possible. Remarkable is the persuasive power of their prose, which is measured, self-effacing, and lucid. Moreover, their book is methodologically unthreatening: The prose is streamlined, the notes are not fat, and the illustrations are many, often unusual and… Full Review

Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 is a book of remarkable depth and range. In contrast with more typical media-specific studies of the past, Paul Binski has undertaken a study that considers the art of the period in an integrated and synthetic manner. Indeed, Binski’s approach not only considers a broad range of media but also a broad range of issues concerning the production and reception of his subject. This dense and complex analysis draws on a variety of methodologies, chief among them the historical and cultural theories developed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In order to develop… Full Review

Uniquely, this book, according to its jacket copy, “presents the hypothesis that the Bayeux Tapestry, long believed to have been made in England, came from the Loire valley in France, from the abbey of St. Florent of Saumur.” For those with more than just a general knowledge of the Tapestry (the assumed audience of this book), this claim will seem bizarre, if not mad! Beech, somewhat like Charles Darwin, “anticipated reactions of stupor and disbelief” (ix) before he put pen to paper, but preferred not to discuss his theory with friends and colleagues until after he had finished the book… Full Review

Pamela Patton’s Pictorial Narrative in the Romanesque Cloister addresses some large, wide-ranging questions that are of interest to all who work on the function and imagery of cloisters or indeed on medieval pictorial narrative in other contexts. The central question is one that has exercised medievalists for a long time: were there any Romanesque cloisters with coherent iconographic programmes? As Patton’s contenders have narrative imagery, she also asks what was the function of that kind of imagery and how was it viewed by the resident monks or canons. Both Ilene Forsyth (“The Vita Apostolica and Romanesque Sculpture: Some Preliminary Observations,”… Full Review

The Art of the Picts marks a lifetime’s collaboration between George and Isabel Henderson, not least on the scholarly front. Isabel became the leading scholar of Pictish art, while her husband George frequently returned to the same subject in his own more wide-ranging studies. Having retired from Cambridge, the Hendersons now live within walking distance of the greatest Pictish cross slab at Nigg, Ross and Cromarty, where they continue to wrestle with the originality and frustrations of Pictish art. For those long steeped in Pictish studies, this joint effort is remarkable for what it does not do. The maps… Full Review

In Japan, Toyo Ito (born 1941) is considered one of the most important figures in post-War Japanese architecture. Based in Tokyo, he has valued both theory and practice, and has used each of them to perceptively articulate the implications of social change. In the 1970s, Ito reflected Japan’s technological enthusiasm, originally calling his firm URBOT, an abbreviation of “Urban Robot.” His work of this period ultimately culminated in Silver Hut, a high-tech aluminum home for his family, where windows were cranked shut by the kind of mechanisms found in automobiles of the time and people sat on airy, expanded-metal chairs… Full Review

It is unusual but probably auspicious for an exhibition to last from January to December, as Tradition and Transformation: Japanese Art 1860–1940 does. Presenting visually compelling images and well-documented histories, the exhibition offers a revealing glimpse into the formative decades of Japan’s emergence as a modernizing nation. The Museum of Fine Arts’ collecting of Japanese art can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, and is deeply indebted to the insight and generosity of a group of Bostonians, including Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Charles Goddard Weld, and Deman Waldo Ross, all of whom traveled… Full Review

Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz navigates the unstable border between art and life. Among his well-known interventions are the ongoing paraSITE series in which he collaborates with urban homeless to design portable housing shelters that can be hooked up to a building’s exterior ventilation system (a working example was included in MoMA’s 2005 exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk) and 2001’s Rise, in which Rakowitz extended a duct from a nearby Chinese bakery into an exhibition space on New York’s Lafayette Street. His current project—a functioning store and import/export business located at 529 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—is his most… Full Review

The Brooklyn Museum’s scholarly catalogue documenting its entire collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century American paintings is a landmark contribution to American art scholarship. Its elegant, clean, and user-friendly design belies the impressive breadth and depth of its content. It is fortuitous—though surely not originally foreseen—that the publication of the book, begun twenty years ago in response to the Luce Foundation’s grants program to support major museum catalogues of American paintings, coincides with the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s Luce Center for American Art. The publication’s extensive entries and data on nearly 700 American paintings by 360 artists make a… Full Review

EAST International, the open-submission exhibition that takes place annually in and around Norwich School of Art and Design, displayed its well-earned self-confidence in 2006, when programming material boasted that, “The trust of artists in the democratic structure of an open exhibition has enabled EAST to become an annual challenge to the expertise of the contemporary art establishment. Not a bad achievement for a small art school gallery in a provincial city.” Perhaps to find this challenge we should look to such galleries in such cities detached from London’s monolithic art establishment (Norwich is in the historic capital of the… Full Review