Recently Published Reviews

Steven Harris’s new book on Surrealism is excellent. It is refreshing to see the politics of Surrealism properly acknowledged, and, at the same time and as part of the same argument, to see the aesthetics that underwrote those politics correctly assessed. In Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche, Harris tracks an extremely rich and nuanced discourse between Surrealism and the French Left, a series of debates virtually unknown in Anglophone culture; he also nicely lays out his arguments in clear and readable prose. But the real issues at stake in this discourse are… Full Review

Shelley Hales’s The Roman House and Social Identity is an important contribution to the study of domestic architecture in general and, more specifically, to our understanding of the politics of identity in the Roman Empire. Her overall purpose is clear from her introduction: to examine domestic art and architecture from the imperial period so that we might “begin to appreciate the complexities of building a Roman identity and the power of the art of impression to overcome them” (7). Combining the studies of literature, rhetoric, architecture, art, archaeology, and politics, Hales creates an accessible and readable text that will be… Full Review

The present study, the fruit of decades of painstaking and dedicated research by a distinguished team of husband-and-wife scholars, focuses on the commercial fabrication of manuscripts in Paris from the early thirteenth century to the rise of printing at the end of the fifteenth century. A 322-page analytical text in twelve chapters, 29 figures, 8 maps, and 80 pages of endnotes fill the first volume. Volume 2 contains a biographical register of some 1,200 men and women active in the medieval Parisian book trade, appendices to each of the study’s twelve chapters, 182 illustrations on coated stock, a full… Full Review

In the introduction to Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618–960, Sarah Fraser describes her project as an inquiry into the medieval artist’s practice through close analysis of several of the sixty-five ink sketches from the ninth and tenth centuries that were preserved in the sealed Cave 17 of the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang and are now mostly in the British Museum in London and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The author examines the relationships between the sketches and the finished murals and silk banner paintings from the ninth-… Full Review

Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum effectively presents the dominant present-day academic ways of understanding museums and contains a range of material not duplicated in any other volume. And considering its length, the book is reasonable in price. The editors’ introductions are lucid, and the essays, which consider a range of topics, are strong. I will begin this review by briefly summarizing the subjects of the essays in the various parts of the book and then offer my evaluation of the volume as a whole. In the first section, which addresses the rhetoric of historiography, Hayden White argues… Full Review

Bram Dijkstra’s book American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920–1950 convincingly constructs a new category of expressionism that he sets apart from early-twentieth-century German Expressionism and mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism. “American Expressionism” combines modernism and realism to address compassionately a range of social issues. Dijkstra examines this art, created largely in the United States during the Great Depression, as a “venture into socialist cultural politics” (12). His thesis is that American Expressionist art was produced primarily by immigrants, the children of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe (mainly Jewish), and “forced immigrants” (or African Americans) (12–13). Dijkstra’s book includes ten chapters.… Full Review

The Belvedere statue court is still widely regarded as one of the “first” antiquities collections in Renaissance Rome, but Sara Magister, in articles published in Xenia Antiqua (1999 and 2001), has identified more than 160 families in Rome who collected ancient works of art before Giuliano della Rovere, as Pope Julius II, broke ground on the Belvedere in 1504. Even if some these “collections” consisted of only a few inscriptions, Magister has shown us the extraordinary extent of the craze for antiquities in fifteenth-century Rome. She has now turned her attention to one of the most important of these collections… Full Review

See "Susan Dackerman's review":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/659 of this catalogue. In this beautifully produced catalogue, the primary theme of gesture and expressiveness in Rembrandt’s storytelling is set forth in the introduction by Clifford Ackley. A secondary theme is the reception of the artist’s work, examined by Ronni Baer with respect to the historical appreciation of the oil sketches and Thomas Rassieur regarding the making of prints. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. Those fortunate to attend the exhibition will have the stupendous experience of viewing a… Full Review

Far too often works of art produced in the Roman provinces have been studied solely in relation to their supposed metropolitan models, with the notion that provincial art was imitation. This approach has led to a devaluation of the works: since they are regarded as derivative, they have not been examined as products of a specific place and time. Consequently, provincial art’s real role as innovative examples of the negotiation of competing concerns by provincial artists has been ignored. Because the textual sources used for understanding the provinces, especially for the Western part of the Roman Empire, are largely metropolitan… Full Review

Mark Meadow begins his book on Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the practice of rhetoric with a rhetorical exercise of his own: an exordium, a commencement on the artist’s identity, on the contours of rhetorical education in sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture, and on his own art-historical method. Like the sixteenth-century humanist Domenicus Lampsonius, Meadows asks, Who is this new Hieronymus Bosch called Pieter Bruegel? Although much of the painter’s biography escapes us, Meadow rightly argues that the artist’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs reveals that Bruegel was well versed in the art of persuasion and quite capable of imaginatively manipulating rhetorical tropes in… Full Review

The status and experience of children in ancient Greek society receive fresh attention and thoughtful consideration in Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past. Both the catalogue and the exhibition that it accompanies probe the social realities of childhood in ancient Greece by examining portrayals of children in Greek art and other articles made for children’s use. As the contributing authors stress throughout the volume, works of art offer tantalizing glimpses into the lives of children, but they do not tell an objective story. The sculptors and painters of the ancient world were… Full Review

These volumes result from the intersection of two series at Cambridge University Press: the Cambridge Companions collection, now numbering over two hundred titles on subjects from Aristotle to William Wordsworth, but including relatively few artists outside the Italian Renaissance, and a more informal series of important books on Hispanic art and culture, including those produced out of the publisher’s New York office under the leadership of Beatrice Rehl. Both volumes under review were partially written and edited in an exemplary fashion by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, and both will be essential additions to any library on Hispanic art. The Cambridge Companion to… Full Review

Ancient Near Eastern art is considered the poor stepchild of all ancient art, banished to the basement of the canon yet somehow supporting the whole structure of art that followed it. In her latest book, Zainab Bahrani attempts to bring the study of ancient Near Eastern art out of the proverbial cellar and into the forefront of academic attention. Considering the conservative nature of past scholarship in the field, it is somewhat unusual that the author chooses to view the most ancient traces of civilization through the most modern of theoretical lenses. As a “culture translator,” Bahrani concedes that she… Full Review

The appearance of Life magazine’s first issue in November 1936 set off an explosion in American visual culture. With unanticipated eagerness viewers snapped up copies of this new, sight-centered magazine that promised to show them the world, photograph by photograph. Audiences delighted in the new prospects the magazine opened to them, as its images granted voyeuristic access to a spectrum of modern life, from the mundane to the marvelous. Once established, the magazine remained a spark plug of American visual experience for more than a quarter century, serving as a self-proclaimed “Show-Book of the World” until the cessation of its… Full Review

Anne Stanton’s book provides a detailed and insightful examination of the Queen Mary Psalter (London, BLMS Royal 2 B.vii), a luxury devotional text that is densely illustrated with Old and New Testament subjects and marginal illuminations. The author focuses on the manuscript as a material artifact, its relationship to devotional manuscripts in England and France, and the connection between its contents and its proposed royal audience. On one level, Stanton’s study, which is based on her doctoral thesis, expands the work of the Warner facsimile (George Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter [London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1912]) and therefore includes… Full Review