Recently Published Reviews

While a veritable Aby Warburg industry has developed in Germany, interest has been slow to grow in Anglophone countries. It is ironic that one of our first Warburg monographs is an English translation of the first book on him to be written in French, Aby Warburg et l’image en movement (Paris: Macula, 1998), written by Philippe-Alain Michaud, film curator at the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and with an introductory preface by Georges Didi-Huberman, the distinguished French art historian. Didi-Huberman published a book on Warburg four years later, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art… Full Review

For students of the early history of prints, these are exciting times. Recent examinations feature print publishers, particularly in the Netherlands, and catalogues of additional individual printmakers. Jan van der Stock’s remarkable Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1998) engages issues of both production and consumption and expands our concept of prints far beyond fine art. Yet surviving evidence has remained scarce about the earliest collections, especially large ones, despite foundational studies by Peter Parshall, William Robinson, and Michael Bury. With The Print Collection of Ferdinand… Full Review

Catherine Scallen’s lively and informative book focuses primarily upon a curious episode in the history of art history: the sizeable and, in hindsight, largely unjustified expansion of the body of paintings ascribed to Rembrandt in the decades preceding World War I. Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship details the origins and evolution of that campaign, during which the number of pictures assigned to the master roughly doubled, while also investigating the social mechanisms that fostered such a dramatic reconsideration of Rembrandt’s artistic production. Scallen pins the development squarely upon the ambitions and working procedures of four highly influential, academically… Full Review

Sarah Burns opens her beguiling book by briefly reflecting on the story of American art that was in vogue when she was a student. This story, which celebrated the “landscape as type and emblem” of republican America, was bright; the glow that flooded these “sunny-side up” landscapes (think Luminism) emanated from the positivist Enlightenment (xv). In Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America, Burns subverts this tidy narrative by turning down the lights that shine on a handful of American paintings in order to get a sense of their dystopian auras. Her motive and… Full Review

In early 1964, shortly after acquiring the studio space at 231 East Forty-Seventh Street in New York that would become known as the Factory, Pop artist Andy Warhol commissioned British fashion photographer David McCabe to document his life for one year. Although the project resulted in over 2,500 photographs, none of the images were used by Warhol, nor were any published until last year’s release of McCabe’s book, A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). The book contains 450 of the shots arranged in chronological order, with captions and short stories by David Dalton, one… Full Review

Recent publications have dramatically refined our knowledge of the late medieval manuscript workshops of northern Europe. Scholars have studied centers of production (e.g., Paris, Amiens, Lyons, and Tournai), major artistic monuments (e.g., the Turin-Milan Hours and the Chroniques de Hainaut), and the oeuvres of individual artists and shops (e.g., Willem Vrelant and the Master of the Champion des Dames). Gregory Clark’s weighty study falls into this latter category, as it closely examines the works ascribed to the Master of the Ghent Privileges (or “Privileges Master,” for short). This master was first associated with an oeuvre by Friedrich Winkler in 1915,… Full Review

The fascination of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work, both the pleasures of the photographs and the interest of his project for those who think about the problems of art, lies in his concept of the “decisive moment.” His work exemplifies a central mode of photographic practice—the snapshot—but the snapshot is not just a way of making pictures. It is also a clear demonstration of a technical determinant of the medium. All photographs, from the staged, long-exposure tableau in the studio to the digital montage, are on some level snapshots. Instantaneity forms the core of photography. The snapshot taken in the… Full Review

Noel Brann’s magisterial volume offers a sweeping survey of the critical fortunes of a contentious but powerfully operative concept in quattrocento and cinquecento Italy: the notion of genial melancholy. In the course of revolving the problem, Brann, a historian of philosophy, Christian thought, and arcana, explores a constellation of ideas on which he has been musing for many years. He produced important articles on aspects of melancholy in medieval and Renaissance culture in the late 1970s. The convergence of hermetic, magical, and naturalist thought, which looms large in the present volume, was the subject of a 1985 article on melancholy… Full Review

Randall Griffin’s well-written and accessible study analyzes a selection of largely canonical paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz in light of period art criticism and artistic, social, and economic transformations of the late nineteenth century. The book aims to illuminate how artists, critics, and patrons made use of art to navigate the conflicted and amorphous nature of American national identity during the Gilded Age. After an introduction that provides an overview of significant currents in Gilded Age art and culture, individual chapters analyze the following subjects: Homer’s Veteran in a New Field (1865) and the ways in… Full Review

Ulrich Pfisterer’s Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430–1445 is the product of a talented scholar who, though working on well-tilled terrain, manages to unearth new material and to produce some very fruitful analyses. Amid a dazzling array of data and a cat’s cradle of intersecting proposals, the fundamental argument of the book—sometimes difficult to discern—concerns the ability of art to convey complex ideas. At stake is the intellectual status of the artist, in this case Donatello. This artist’s sculptures of the 1430s and early 1440s explicitly reveal, Pfisterer contends, a successful struggle to make visible certain concepts current in… Full Review

James Elkins’s book The Domain of Images is an argument for extending aesthetic inquiry beyond the conventional bounds of images that typically provide the focus for art-historical research. Elkins strives to look at the world of images rather than the pragmatic relation that images bear to the world, which he believe characterizes paintings and drawings. The book promotes a few iconoclastic attitudes, broadens some horizons, and seeks to make philosophers, art historians, and art critics more aware of the present ferment in approaches to writing art history. In other words, despite Elkins’s explicit refusal to attend to the normative dimensions… Full Review

That most Chicagoans who have encountered Dan Peterman’s work have done so without knowing it seems as fitting a tribute to the artist’s ambitions as does the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Indeed, as much as I enjoyed seeing Plastic Economies, I have equally enjoyed using Peterman’s installation Chicago Ground Cover (1997)— without realizing it was an installation—while learning to samba, salsa, shimmy, and shake atop the smooth surface during classes held by Grant Park’s SummerDance program. The highly functional exterior dance floor, made of reprocessed, postconsumer plastic, extends Peterman’s earlier, gallery-based project, Ground… Full Review

Shortly before I visited the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte”, an art historian friend in Berlin wrote me, asking if the show was traveling to Europe. The answer is no, and visitors to the exhibition are told the reason why: in 1958, a fire broke out at New York’s Museum of Modern Art while A Sunday on La Grande Jatte was on display there. Though Georges Seurat’s canvas was unharmed, the Art Institute decided that the painting would never again be lent. That absolute stipulation… Full Review

The title of this volume of essays on illustrated manuscripts in the Wellcome Library, London, says more than editor Nigel Allan may have intended. The notion of gems plucked from an exoticized Orient, replete with objects there for the taking, fills colonialist—and, to build on the title, Orientalist—fantasy, including that of Sir Henry Wellcome, who founded the pharmaceutical company that bears his name and who built the collection. The Wellcome Library, a center for the history and understanding of medicine, houses a splendid collection of manuscripts, both Western and Asian. It also maintains a continuing exhibition schedule at the library… Full Review

For several years now, the MIT Press has pursued a mission to acquaint English-language readers with the modern art and architecture of east-central Europe. With impressive dedication, MIT editor Roger Conover has sought experts living or born in the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia, and he has also brought forth exhibition catalogues and source readers authored in the United States. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these efforts in expanding Slavic and Eastern European Studies, fields that have perennially been oriented to the study of literature and political history and closed to those not… Full Review