Recently Published Reviews

The last word on the history of the New York School is far from having been written. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses announces a new chapter in the study of mid-century art and criticism by attempting to conclude one. At the end of her preface, Caroline Jones reveals, “More than anything else I’ve written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it” (xxix). Her central claim is that Greenberg’s art criticism served to limit and reduce experience to the visual, which, in the process… Full Review

Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review

Allen Hockley’s long-awaited monograph on Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90) is a welcome addition to the literature on Japan’s eighteenth-century print culture. Not only does he focus on one of the too-long neglected masters of the period, he also presents a fine analysis of some of Koryūsai’s major themes as well as his best-known series of single prints, Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves. That this study is, indeed, long overdue can be inferred from the fact that Koryūsai has received little scholarly attention in spite of the sheer number of designs for which he was responsible. As… Full Review

Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review

The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review

With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review

Francisco de Goya's Los Caprichos (1799), a series of eighty etchings and aquatints, are widely known as satiric criticisms of human ignorance and folly. The artist is democratic in his critical assessment of society and its customs, from the superstitious beliefs of the lower classes to the genealogical obsession of aristocrats. Although the series includes themes particular to Spain at the turn of the century, Goya often veils these fixed references with ambiguous meanings, settings, and figures. Thus, many of the critiques expressed pictorially by Goya have application for locations and times outside of late-eighteenth-century Spain, giving the series a… Full Review

Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru is a welcome addition to the literature on the art of ancient Peru. The Moche were a state-level society who prospered in the first seven or so centuries AD on the desert coast of what is now northern Peru. They were prolific and prodigious artists in many media, the most famous being metalwork, the most numerous being ceramics. The gold-filled graves at Sipán and other Moche sites have been discovered in the last twenty years, and much progress has been made in our knowledge of this important ancient American society and its art. Christopher… Full Review

In an inspired act of programming, in the summer of 2005 the Prado Museum exhibited a selection of paintings associated with the legendary Palace of the Buen Retiro. Not only does the accompanying catalogue shed light on an unparalleled chapter in the artistic patronage of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–65), it also marks a resourceful initiative by the Prado to draw attention to the strengths of its own holdings. The museum, which borrowed just three of the roughly sixty works in the exhibition, used the occasion to commemorate an enterprise generally accorded fragmentary coverage in the literature on seventeenth-century… Full Review

Ellen Perry offers a clear and forthright, if sometimes oversimplified, account of the complex, highly sophisticated discourses that characterized the Roman "aesthetics of emulation." In so doing, she seeks to transform the debate on Roman copying, with a particular focus on Roman statues of gods and heroes, so-called ideal sculpture. This debate has important repercussions for Romanists, and indeed for the field of art history as a whole. After all, Roman ideal sculptures are familiar to most art historians—but not as Roman works of art. Instead, statues that appear stylistically Greek, such as the Apollo Belvedere… Full Review

In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of "Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture," which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing "affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber's concept of rationalization to account for art's different… Full Review

Comprised of one wonderful work after another, Villa America: American Modern, 1900–1950 makes a strong impression. Beyond presenting many excellent works, the exhibition illuminates the visual dialogue concerning style and theme undertaken between and among U.S. artists during the first half of the twentieth century, a particularly exciting period in U.S. art history. With its illuminating juxtapositions of works and its many self-portraits, Villa America brings to life the excitement and energy that percolated within the U.S. art world during this now rather distant era. The exhibition presents for the first time selections from the private collection of Myron Kunin… Full Review

Robert Aguirre should be commended for calling our attention to the less-studied area of the circulation between, and symbolic function of, collections and displays in nineteenth-century Britain and parts of Latin America. Largely centered on nationalist discourses, Aguirre's very useful and informative Informal Empire explains the ways that England, in the place of direct military colonization of post-independence Mexico and Central America, and in the face of increasing interventions by the United States, nonetheless managed to play a vital, if not controlling, economic role in those regions. England did so, Aguirre argues, through the appropriation, trans-Atlantic exchange, and display of… Full Review

The two titles of this exhibition curated by Phillip Dennis Cate are in many respects contradictory. The subtitle, Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, is utterly banal and could apply to any of the dozens of exhibitions mounted in the past thirty years on the sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century: an assemblage of masterworks, of famous names, of marbles and bronzes. But the main title, Breaking the Mold, announces an entirely different agenda: It recalls the moment when, at the end of the bronze-founding process, the clay form that surrounds the poured metal… Full Review