Recently Published Reviews

To the untrained eye, Thai paintings can be hard to decipher. They look confusing, crowded with colorful figures that appear similar in detail and character, leaving no place to focus one’s attention. For those who wish to study Thai painting in its various forms—murals, banners, and manuscript painting—guidance from a visually rich, scholarly book would be invaluable. Reading Thai Murals by David Wyatt, the distinguished American historian of Thailand, should be such a book but falls short of the mark. Attractively presented, Reading Thai Murals focuses on the distinctive Buddhist murals dating from the late nineteenth… Full Review

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South explores a period and a region of indigenous art little known even within the field of Native American art studies. Long studied by archaeologists, this vast area, roughly bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico, has been largely neglected by art historians and art museums. The only previous large-scale exhibition of material from this region occurred nearly twenty years ago.[1] Recently, however, scholars have begun reevaluate the imagery of these ancient cultures, and interdisciplinary seminars held over… Full Review

Gerard ter Borch is the first exhibition dedicated to this important seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter and portraitist in thirty years, and its accompanying catalogue simultaneously serves as the only comprehensive study on the artist to appear in English to date. The catalogue is smaller than that of the exhibition that took place in The Hague and Münster in 1974, and smaller still than Sturla J. Gudlaugsson’s truly monumental study of Terborch that appeared in 1959–60. Nevertheless, the present exhibition and catalogue open up some new avenues of inquiry, which is only natural given scholarly trajectories in the field over the… Full Review

What do we mean when we attribute a painting to an artist in the Netherlands or consider it belonging to the “school of Florence”? These regional designations, the coupling of artworks with place, are central to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new book, which examines notions of cultural geography as they apply to art. Toward a Geography of Art offers the first concentrated consideration of the value of location in the definition of works of art and, as such, is a thoroughly useful endeavor. Only some twenty years ago, Karl Poma, vice president of the Flemish Government of Belgium, introduced a lavish… Full Review

Despite the fact that Louise Bourgeois has been making art for more than seven decades, her drawings, sculptures, and installations are completely contemporary. At the age of ninety-four, she is, according to the exhibition curator Frances Morris, “the oldest of young artists” (10). Organized by Morris, senior curator at the Tate Modern in London, with Brenda McParland, head of exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time is an intimate and engaging exhibition of her recent fabric sculptures, drawings, and a handful of older engravings. After a European tour, the exhibition closes at the Museum… Full Review

To understand museums and art history, Foucauldians say, we need to understand the changing political roles of these institutions. Knowledge of the past is never neutral, for it always serves present goals. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s very ambitious, splendidly achieved book, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, tells the story of the development of art history in India. Her study explains how English figures such as Alexander Cunningham developed their vision of Indian art’s history, contrasting the elegance of Buddhism with the degenerate excesses of Hinduism. The book also shows how the early colonial museums were… Full Review

El Greco (henceforth cited as Greco) constituted the first comprehensive North American exhibition of the work of Domenikos Theotokopolous (1541–1614) since El Greco of Toledo (henceforth cited as Toledo) of 1982–83, organized by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and traveling to Madrid, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas. A groundbreaking exhibition, Toledo brought together a substantial proportion of the artist’s most important paintings for the first time. The success of that exhibition in defining a corpus of recognized masterpieces is suggested by the inclusion of thirty-seven of the sixty-six paintings from Toledo in Greco. With eighty-three… Full Review

Billboards and advertisements all over New York declare that “Manhattan is Modern Again,” often showing an image of angled sunlight raking an elegant building interior. The subscript directs you to the locus of this statement: “The new Museum of Modern Art reopens in Midtown on November 20.” These messages formed a long and careful campaign that generated breathless prepublicity in all media, secured a largely reverential art-world response, brought in twenty thousand visitors on opening day, and racked up record attendances ever since. Given the jewels of early and midcentury modernism that are the core of MoMA’s collection, nothing less… Full Review

Of the dozen decorated biblical manuscripts that survive from late antiquity, the so-called Ashburnham Pentateuch in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. nouv. acq. 2334) is the most elaborate. Its eighteen (more or less) full-page illustrations contain some one hundred scenes set in detailed landscapes and rich architectural settings; and its ten chapter lists are adorned with decorated arches and ornamental fauna. Compared to the other surviving manuscripts, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is also relatively unstudied: even Kurt Weitzmann, who scavenged virtually every bit of evidence to support his concept of the evolution of the illustrated codex, all but completely… Full Review

Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, a book that accompanied an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, combines extensive art-historical analysis of the painting with detailed study by conservators. The most dramatic contribution is the “rejuvenated” image of La Grande Jatte, a full-scale reproduction created by Roy S. Berns using digital technology to replace Georges Seurat’s now-darkened zinc yellow with something close to the original color. An essay by Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley traces the compositional evolution of the picture by studying it with a variety of imaging techniques. Inge Fiedler analyzes Seurat’s materials and… Full Review

According to Rosemarie Mulcahy, the reputation of Philip II has suffered from bad press throughout the years. She writes, “The image [of Philip] that prevails is that of the severe assiduous defender of the Catholic Faith, a dry and mean-spirited personality” (xv). Indeed, the specter of the Inquisition, the harsh Spanish rule of the Netherlands, and the aloof late portraiture of the man in black have done little to counter negative impressions. In this book, composed of both previously published research and new material, Mulcahy aims to realign our perception of Philip through the examination of his artistic patronage. She… Full Review

Recent, new, and commissioned works by artists from mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are showcased in the exhibition Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, organized by the San Diego Museum of Art. The exhibition’s curator, Betti-Sue Hertz, aims to explore how such art references the past. As the idea of the “past” can mean many things, her thematic focus poses an unusual challenge for the viewer who may lack the requisite knowledge of the region known as East Asia. An illustrated catalogue with essays by the curator and other scholars and critics from… Full Review

Provocatively described by the artist Joan Jonas as a Mannerist, Robert Smithson is certainly best, and sometimes only, remembered for his iconic earthwork pieces, in particular his Spiral Jetty of 1970 (Brian Conley and Joe Amrhein, eds., Collection of Writings on Robert Smithson [New York: Pierogi, 2000], 37). So does this epithet have any merit? The recent retrospective of Smithson’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the first such comprehensive exhibition in the United States, answered this with a resounding “yes.” Smithson’s formal language is certainly one of movement, space, spiritual intensity, anticlassicism, and the fusion of… Full Review

In the past several decades, major art exhibitions and significant scholarly publications on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and prints of daily life have manifested the enthusiastic scrutiny of such imagery by scholars and the public alike. The thousands of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings offer seemingly accurate views of daily life; however, as numerous scholars have addressed, the subject matter of such scenes has been selectively determined, resulting in the omission of many ordinary aspects of Dutch life. Scholars have posited various methodological approaches to recover the meaning and function of such images for their seventeenth-century middle- and upper-class viewers. In Dutch… Full Review

Building on recent scholarship that has revealed the degree to which the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi was not a simple copyist but an independently minded artist, Lisa Pon’s book, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, argues that his works are products of collaboration: among the engraver, the inventor, and the publisher on the one hand, and between the viewer and the image on the other. Pon situates Marcantonio’s engravings against the rise during the sixteenth century of what she describes as the “artist-author”—celebrated most memorably in Giorgio Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s heroic single-handed paintings of… Full Review