Recently Published Reviews

A large number of beautifully illustrated catalogues of Spanish drawings have been published in the last ten years, many to accompany exhibitions, as the more fragile treasures of Spanish art are being studied and brought to a wider audience. The Catálogo de la Collección de Dibujos del Instituto Jovellanos de Gijón stands apart from this group, as it is a reprint and enhancement of a catalogue first published in 1969 by a pioneer in the study of Spanish drawings, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Before its demise, the Jovellanos collection of drawings had been catalogued by Jesús Menéndez Acebal in the… Full Review

This past summer, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, inspired by the history and legacies of their collections and even the buildings that house them, focused on abstraction—each with a major exhibition and accompanying publication: The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950–2005 at the AGO and Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox. Responding to a bemused critic in a statement to the New York Times on June 13, 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, assisted by Barnett Newman, declared: “To us art is an adventure… Full Review

The recent exhibition, Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, focused on early fifteenth-century Italian relief sculptures from the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Organized by Peta Motture, Glyn Davies, and Stuart Frost at the museum and by Penelope Curtis, Martina Droth, and Stephen Feeke of the Henry Moore Institute, it was the first exhibition to focus on Italian early fifteenth-century relief sculpture, and it presented the subject in a provocative and innovative way. Its specific purposes were to explore how the sculptures might be… Full Review

The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative… Full Review

Lianne McTavish’s book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, is part of an Ashgate series entitled Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, a group of collected essays and single-authored volumes that investigate subjects as diverse as identity politics, widowhood, and the book trade. Ashgate is, indeed, one of the few publishing houses still willing to produce these sorts of studies, especially in the form of collected essays, and we are indebted to them for their efforts to bring new studies of women and gender into the scholarly realm. Like the other books in… Full Review

Although many of Jacques-Louis David’s best-known paintings are in French public collections, over the past century U.S. institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Clark Art Institute have managed to snap up significant works by the artist. The presence in the United States of these images, which date mainly from the Napoleonic Empire and David’s period of post-Napoleonic exile in Brussels, was the stimulus for an exhibition of David’s late work at both the Getty and the Clark last year. The exhibition was accompanied by… Full Review

It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family… Full Review

Wu Hung, Chinese born, has become a well-known U.S. art historian. Author of a number of distinguished books discussing the art of his native country, in Remaking Beijing he tells the history of Tiananmen Square, the gate to the Imperial Palace. Every tourist who goes to Beijing visits this central site. Coming from the east, you go north to buy a ticket and enter the Forbidden City. But if you walk south just before entering the Square, you reach the Museum of Chinese History, which now contains displays of art and a waxworks exhibition showing the communist rulers, various emperors… Full Review

Over a century of scholarship in Islamic art has produced numerous monographs, catalogues, and surveys; yet until recently, only a few studies have been published on the aesthetics of Islamic art. The last three decades, however, have seen several books and exhibitions that claim to deal with the “common principles,” “aesthetics,” and “philosophy” of Islamic art. Oliver Leaman’s book is both a contribution to and a critique of this particular tradition Although according to Leaman his book is intended to “establish a solid foundation for the aesthetics of Islamic art” (vii), the book is in fact not solely focused on… Full Review

Despite its modest format, this is a monumental book. The author has fitted into comparatively few pages one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical analysis, and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century. This is no unremarkable accomplishment, as it can only have been written in the maturity of a scholarly career engaged with the history, culture, and art of Europe in its full geographical and intellectual breadth, from the Renaissance through the Baroque into Neo-Classicism. But as striking as is the erudition informing the book’s multiple theses, equally impressive… Full Review

The title of this collection, Chinese-Language Film, proposes a linguistically based category through which to consider a block of films, directors, and styles. This grouping obviously works against the notion of national cinema, but it also works against a transnational ethnic identification that would include, for example, films about Chinese life in the United States, Europe, South America, or other locales if those films’ predominant language is English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or any language that is not Chinese. Given that language specificity and its implications are often ignored in many fields—under the utopian desire, perhaps, for transparency and easy… Full Review

On the evening I attended the Greater New York 2005 exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, I was surprised to find that the line queuing around the block was not there to see the works of one hundred and sixty of New York’s freshest artistic talents hanging in the galleries, halls, stairwells, bathrooms, and boiler room, but was waiting to join the mass of bodies slowly packing into the building’s courtyard. As it turns out, on summer Saturday nights P.S.1 hosts d.j.ed dance parties with liquor licenses (my admission ticket was a self-stick fiberglass wrist band). Much of the crowd… Full Review

At the dawn of abstraction in the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for artists and critics to locate in the decorative or ornamental a model of pure form. At the same time, the decorative’s varied associations with the “decorative arts,” “craft,” the domestic realm, femininity, utility, and the everyday always rendered it suspect as an art free from the material realm. Ultimately, the decorative as a source for the modernist notion of art’s purity or autonomy was aggressively suppressed by modern artists and critics. Ernst Gombrich observed, “There is nothing the abstract painter . . . dislike[s] more… Full Review

Even today, in an age of virtual realities, it is difficult to view Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Canon van der Paele of 1436 without being shaken by it. The level of illusionism attained in this picture is, bluntly put, mind-boggling. Jan has rendered an entirely credible interior space—cropped on all four sides by the sides of the painting—receding behind the picture plane and ending at a distance that appears measurable. This fictive space, representing the choir of a Romanesque church with an ambulatory wrapped around it, is occupied by figures that are three-dimensional in all but actuality. There are… Full Review

Hilla Rebay’s life lends itself to biography. Rebay (1890–1967) was a colorful and controversial figure in the transatlantic art world, a modern woman well connected in avant-garde and society circles. As narratives about her life convey, she had first-hand knowledge of movements such as Jugendstil, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and trends in abstraction. Rebay was ambitious, and that drive resulted in the formation of a world-renowned assemblage of works by Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Chagall, and Moholy-Nagy—to name but a few of the modern masters—that would become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection. But it was her role as artist—modernist and portrait… Full Review