Recently Published Reviews

This book was written in part to document the collection of gold objects from Africa, Asia, and America donated in 1997 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Alfred C. Glassell, Jr., a collector and philanthropist from Houston. The book also serves as the catalogue for the touring exhibition of the Akan part of the collection. Numbering more than nine hundred objects, it is the largest collection of Akan chiefly regalia in the world. The principal author of the book, Doran Ross, has studied and worked among the Ghanaian Akan for the past thirty years. Widely published on the… Full Review

Two discourses of Minimalism have come to determine its academic reception today, both of which reject theories by the twentieth century’s most prominent critic, Clement Greenberg. One line of thought stresses the objecthood of an artwork against Greenberg’s insistence that modernist painting remain true to the inherent, unique qualities of the medium. The other emphasizes the phenomenological experience one has of sculpture in real time and space against Greenberg’s call for a disembodied, intuitive experience of a work. Either discourse moves its results toward Michael Fried’s dreaded theatricality, where the work of art shifts to the subject who beholds the… Full Review

The Norton Simon Museum’s exhibition of thirty black-chalk drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard offered the viewer an unusual challenge. Consisting of drawings after old-master paintings executed by Fragonard during a tour of Italy in 1760–61, the exhibition took as its subject the education of an artist. By positioning near each drawing a small photo reproduction of the original painting that Fragonard was copying, the viewer was inevitably drawn into a game of comparison as well as a quest to find traces of the mature artist in these accomplished early copies. I was struck first by how faithful Fragonard… Full Review

The recent publication of two surveys of Sienese painting is another indication of a noticeable boom in this field. Such historians as William Bowsky, Samuel Cohn, and Daniel Waley have fueled this resurgence, and their investigations of the political, religious, and social institutions of the Commune of Siena identified a unique and influential culture with well-preserved archival records. Building upon their work, art historians have added the study of historical and documentary context to the traditional analysis of style that in the late nineteenth century first articulated a separate “Sienese School.” Hayden Maginnis’s historiographical study, Painting in the Age of… Full Review

Kathleen Kamerick’s study of late medieval art and piety in England is partly a history of strong reactions to images. The book begins with the 1429 heresy trial of a Lollard, an adherent of a heretical reform movement led by John Wyclif and others. The accused, Margery Baxter, had suggested to a friend that the images in the local church were not only the base material creations of “lewd” craftsmen but were also idols inhabited by demons (13–14). This Lollard contempt for religious images was often accompanied by acts of destruction. In the 1380s, for example, two men in need… Full Review

Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University, is probably the best-known architectural historian in the United States. During a teaching career that stretched from 1947 to 1991, Scully established a reputation as one of Yale’s most inspiring lecturers. How many other architectural historians have been profiled in the New Yorker, had their retirement covered on the front page of the New York Times, or lectured at the White House? A new collection of twenty Scully essays spanning from 1954 to 1998, edited by Harvard professor and former Scully student Neil Levine, allows us to reconsider this acclaimed… Full Review

See "Amy Golahny's review":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/643 of this catalogue. Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher is the outcome of Clifford Ackley’s own Rembrandt odyssey. His long and intensive study of the artist’s work has resulted in three landmark exhibitions and catalogues, and through these publications the course of Rembrandt print scholarship can be charted over nearly thirty-five years. (Although this exhibition and catalogue include the artist’s work in a variety of media, etchings far outnumber paintings and drawings.) Ackley’s earliest Rembrandt endeavor, Rembrandt: Experimental Etcher (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), written jointly with Felice Stampfle, Eleanor Sayre, and Sue Reed,… Full Review

Cultural theory fiddles while the world burns. It is this perversion that Terry Eagleton hopes to remedy with his newest jeremiad, After Theory. Here is the problem, which September 11 and the resulting War on Terror made crystal clear: cultural theorists—and by this label he lumps together all those wrong-minded poststructuralists, neopragmatists, and postmodernists, from Jacques Derrida to Stanley Fish to Fredric Jameson—strip majorities of the norms and stable identities that are necessary to oppose real power. And by power he means the coarse kind that decides who eats and who goes hungry. “Only an intellectual who has overdosed… Full Review

More than a century has elapsed since the inauguration of Classical Javanese archaeological studies by the perspicacious and prolific scholars working under the auspices of the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Service. Despite this fact scholarly explorations of the religious edifices of the Eastern Javanese Period (ca. 970 to 1500) still continue to be overshadowed by the extraordinary artistic legacy of the preceding Central Javanese era (ca. 750 to 930), particularly by the remarkable monuments that have become synonymous with this epoch: Candi Borobudur and the Loro Jonggrang Temple Complex. This earlier phase was perhaps more appealing, with forms echoing those… Full Review

The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China is a well-illustrated and handsomely produced volume that presents itself as a survey of the development and transformation of the Chinese calligraphic tradition in the modern era (defined here as the roughly fifty-year period from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the century). Despite its grand ambitions, however, the book turns out, upon closer inspection, to be something far more limited: namely, a catalogue published to accompany an exhibition entitled Brushes with Surprise: The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, held at the British Museum in… Full Review

Valentin Groebner’s latest book, his fourth, is nothing if not timely. An engaging (but also slightly uneven) series of studies involving ways in which bodies, and markings upon bodies, carried meaning and acted as the ground for physical violence in late medieval Europe, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages treats a subject that stands more or less at the center of discussions involving Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, the photographs of charred corpses in Fallujah, Iraq, and images of naked prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. Importantly, this connection is not… Full Review

Suzaan Boettger’s recent book is an attempt to write a comprehensive social art history of the short-lived movement known as Earthworks. It has many good features and a number of bad ones; all are inherent in the book’s founding premise, namely that such a movement existed in the first place. The historical material that Boettger very ably presents is quite interesting. It includes detailed and well-researched accounts of important exhibitions, such as the Earth Art show at Cornell University in 1969 and the foundational EARTH WORKS exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968. She also handles the… Full Review

We know a great deal about Michelangelo: we have his poetry, his letters, the biographies written by Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari—individuals who knew him well—and many comments made by friends, acquaintances, and enemies. Of course we also have his art and architecture, which we can assess with our own eyes. That art, studied in relationship to the sixteenth-century writings about the artist’s life and his works, offers a rich heritage that is still open to new interpretation, despite decades of scholarship on the topic. This volume, which publishes three lectures—“The Metamorphoses of Marble,” “The Finger of God,” and “The… Full Review

Winner of CAA’s 2004 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Two types of publication, kept quite separate in the past, are brought together in John Beldon Scott’s sumptuously produced book: a “shroud” literature, or “Sindonology” (the local, devotional, and scientific literature around the relic), and a “chapel” literature, focusing on Guarino Guarini’s housing for the shroud, a black marble–clad chapel long considered wildly enigmatic. While the “shroud” literature may smack to some of incense, Scott discovered that it is, in one respect, more clear-sighted than much art-historical literature, which had turned a blind… Full Review

In his 1568 Life of the Florentine painter Jacopo Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari describes how Michelangelo executed a full-size drawing or cartoon for his patron Bartolomeo Bettini, a merchant-banker, which showed: a nude Venus with a Cupid who is kissing her, in order that he might have it executed in painting by Pontormo and place it in the center of a “chamber” of his own, in the lunettes of which he had begun to have painted by Bronzino figures of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, with the intention of having there all the other poets who have sung of love … Full Review