Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Catherine E. Karkov and Fred Orton, eds.
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002. 240 pp.; 4 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0937058793)
The concept of difference unites the essays in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Though comprised of six papers from a day-long seminar at the 1998 International Congress at Leeds, this collection arrives in two parts: essays by Jane Hawkes and Catherine E. Karkov look at relatively little-known examples of Anglo-Saxon eighth and ninth-century sculpture, and contributions by Fred Orton, Richard N. Bailey, Ian Wood, and Éamonn Ò Carragáin engage in an often-argumentative conversation about approaches to the two best-known early-Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures, the monuments at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. The benefit of the collection lies in the chance for the contributors… Full Review
January 20, 2004
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Jane Green and Leah Levy, eds.
Intro Marla Prather Berkeley: University of California Press in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003. 226 pp.; 13 color ills.; 78 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0520233557)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 2, 2003–February 29, 2004
Jay DeFeo and The Rose is the long-awaited monograph dedicated solely to this artist and her best-known painting. Its eleven essays from a prestigious roster of authors work together to situate DeFeo’s achievements within American postwar art, and its thirteen color plates and seventy-eight black-and-white photographs sustain these texts and enhance the reader’s experience. Challenging art-historical essays by her biographer Richard Cándida-Smith and art critic Carter Ratcliff are particularly significant contributions to the body of DeFeo scholarship. The inclusion of Lucy Lippard, whose essay positions the artist within the context of the critic’s previous writing, is impressive. The… Full Review
January 15, 2004
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Barbara A. Barletta
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 232 pp.; 87 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (0521792452)
In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius provides the earliest surviving account of the origins of what we have called, since the Renaissance, the orders of Greek architecture. Vitruvius, however, wrote during the early years of the Roman Empire—some six hundred years after the orders first developed—and his first-hand experience of early Greek architecture must have been limited at best. The numerous Greek treatises on architecture that he had at his disposal and to which he routinely refers in his writings were for the most part relatively late, dating by and large to the Hellenistic period, again, long after… Full Review
January 13, 2004
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Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 256 pp.; 30 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0300098170)
Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips’s Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective is a curious book: while largely synoptic, written by two nonspecialists who rely heavily on previously published research, it also constitutes an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the reception of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings among contemporary viewers. Issues of audience response have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. The authors take their cue from the likes of Alison Kettering and Elizabeth Honig, among others, who have already investigated questions of audience reception vis-à-vis seventeenth-century Dutch art. But although Muizelaar and Phillips… Full Review
January 12, 2004
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Paul Joannides
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 352 pp.; 146 color ills.; 128 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (0300087217)
Charles Hope
Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2003. 192 pp.; 146 color ills.; 17 b/w ills. Cloth $39.95 (1857099044)
The National Gallery, London, February 19–May 18, 2003
Paul Joannides’ elegantly written and superbly illustrated book constitutes a significant addition to the study of Renaissance art history. With substantial attention given to the vast body of earlier opinion—both recent and remote—he embraces the challenge of early cinquecento Venetian painting, an arena of far-reaching innovation but one that is exceptionally vexed with unresolved questions of authorship and date. The subject is therein vulnerable to speculation and subjectivity concerning directions of influence among the major protagonists and their responses and contributions to humanist culture and to Central Italian and Northern European art. Always keeping in sight the complexity of this… Full Review
January 9, 2004
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Heather Dawkins
Cambridge University Press, 2000. 232 pp.; 0 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (0521807557)
During the last three decades, the topic of the female nude and its spectatorship has frequently been discussed. In fact, this issue has played a major role in far-reaching reevaluations by feminist and social art history as well as by studies in other fields. Although scholars have addressed the nude and spectatorship in relation to art of the nineteenth century and to the institutional barriers that limited women art students’ access to studying from nude models, most of these investigations have tended to focus on a particular artist, group of artists, theme, or institutional framework. Building on this body of… Full Review
January 7, 2004
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Christine Y. Kim, Vijay Prashad, and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs
Exh. cat. Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003. 120 pp.; many color ills. $25.00 (0942949269)
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, October 15, 2003–January 4, 2004. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003. 120 pp.; many color ills. $25.00 (paper) (0942949269)
While a handful of exhibitions have looked at the relationship between African Americans, Asians, and Asian Americans in visual art, such as Ancestors, a joint effort by Kenkeleba House and the Asian American Arts Centre in 1995, Black Belt is the largest exploration to date. As the title implies, it is structured around the premise of a cross-cultural fascination with Asian martial arts epitomized by the messianic icon Bruce Lee. Yet despite the backing of a thriving institution and the obvious energy and optimism on the part of the artists and curator Christine Y. Kim, the exhibition is disappointing… Full Review
December 29, 2003
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Maryvelma Smith O’Neil
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 428 pp.; 15 color ills.; 108 b/w ills. Cloth $130.00 (0521570387)
Maryvelma Smith O’Neil’s Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome is the first monograph in English on this important but relatively unstudied artist. In five interpretive chapters accompanying a handlist of works, the author aims to raise the standing of Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) in modern art history through a consideration of his artistic development—as painter and as draftsman—within a social and institutional context. In addition to this already ambitious project, O’Neil considers Baglione’s literary production: Le nove chiese (1639) and Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (1642). A book of this scope has long been… Full Review
December 18, 2003
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Ingo Herklotz
Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1998. 439 pp.; 226 ills. Cloth €138.00 (3777477508)
Most of what remains of Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s collection of drawings—a collection that he referred to as the Museo Cartaceo (or “Paper Museum”)—survives as loose sheets and bound volumes in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and the British Museum in London. The surviving works include drawings of mineral samples, plants and animals from Mexico, and more familiar fauna and flora. In addition, there are more than 2,300 representations of ancient monuments and objects. Perhaps in response to a perceived overspecialization in contemporary academia, Dal Pozzo’s collection has been the object of much scholarly interest in the past two decades. After… Full Review
December 15, 2003
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Huigen Leeflang
Exh. cat. Waanders, 2002. 352 pp.; 190 color ills.; 160 b/w ills. $52.50 (9040087946)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, March 6–May 25, 2004; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 26–September 7, 2003; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, October 17, 2003–January 4, 2004
Published to accompany the first monographic exhibition of Hendrick Goltzius’s dazzling prints, drawings, penwercken, and paintings, this catalogue consists of a useful biographical sketch followed by brief essays and entries describing successive phases of the artist’s career. The book aims, in the words of the directors of the three host institutions, “to present a comprehensive and balanced picture of Hendrick Goltzius as a draughtsman, printmaker, and painter” (5). Given this stated objective, we might well ask what impression of the artist the visitor to the exhibition and reader of the catalogue are invited to form. Deeply susceptible to artistic… Full Review
December 12, 2003
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Patricia Berger
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. 266 pp.; 66 b/w ills.; 66 ills. Cloth $42.00 (0824825632)
Patricia Ann Berger’s Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China is not just the first monograph on court art of this period in Western language, but also a much-needed contribution to the study of Manchu court culture in general, an area enjoying something of renaissance in the last decade. Like recent publications by cultural historians, Berger’s work could be read as contrasting the “cynical” view on Manchu rulers, a view that dismisses the emperors’ cultural projects or religious practices as purely political manipulation or that explains them as a result of the rulers’ personal obsession with… Full Review
December 11, 2003
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Alessandro Bagnoli
Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2003. 539 pp.; 300 ills. €48.00 (8882154831)
On June 9, 1311, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà was placed on the high altar of Siena cathedral. A mid-fourteenth-century Sienese chronicle describes its first presentation to the city: bq. On the day on which it was carried to the Duomo, the shops were locked up and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession, accompanied by the Signori of the Nine and all the officials of the Commune, and all the populace and all the most worthy were in order next to the said panel with lights lit in their hands,… Full Review
December 11, 2003
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Elizabeth Pilliod
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 292 pp.; 40 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300085435)
Writing historiography is one of the most self-revealing acts an art historian is likely to perform. That is probably why many eminent scholars have kept well away from it. To confront Giorgio Vasari’s personal prejudices, jealousies and hatreds, and silences and suppressions of fact is to come into critical conflict with the mainstream of art-historical interpretation—the lengthy, authoritative tradition of credence given to the biographer. Paul Barolsky found his own gentle and inimitable way around this problem in his valuable monographic reassessments of the literary themes in Vasari’s Vite. For most scholars, however, the way to expose Vasari’s animus… Full Review
November 24, 2003
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Peter Paret
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 246 pp.; 38 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (052182138X)
The most substantial studies on the art and politics of Nazi Germany in English have been written, with few exceptions, by historians. Why art historians have not taken a stronger interest presumably has to do with a strongly rooted aversion to cultural artifacts so closely associated with modern dictatorial power, so alien from the things the profession has tended to think possess cognitive interest and aesthetic appeal. In any case, the longstanding discrepancy between the attention given to National Socialist Germany by historians and its neglect by art historians continues to exist. At a CAA Annual Conference session on German… Full Review
November 24, 2003
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Debra Higgs Strickland
Princeton University Press, 2002. 335 pp.; 16 color ills.; 146 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0691057192)
Capitalizing on a trend that has figured prominently in recent art-historical studies, Debra Higgs Strickland’s new book investigates the place of the Other in the art of the Middle Ages. She structures her tale around an ideological assertion that will be familiar to scholars of the medieval West: namely, that for theologians and artists in this period, the non-Christian was effectively nonhuman. Strickland’s study demonstrates how this ideology of dehumanization haunted medieval imagery in ways that are not always consistent or logical when viewed from the vantage point of the modern viewer. This simultaneous need for and hatred of outsiders… Full Review
November 13, 2003
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