Recently Published Reviews

Feminist art history is now a well-established subfield of Western art history, but until quite recently those studying gender in pre-Columbian art had to rely on a slim bibliography. Today, several contributions focusing on the pre-Columbian and early colonial world have appeared, including one on women throughout the ancient Americas (Karen Bruhns and Karen Stothert, Women in Ancient America [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999]), another on gender in Mesoamerica (Rosemary Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000]), and two volumes on Maya women (Traci Ardren, ed., Ancient Maya Women [Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira… Full Review

Yet another Count. After Balthus (Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola by his own naming), we read that Wolfgang Paalen called himself “Count von Paalen” before selling his title in an impoverished moment in Paris. According to Amy Winter, Paalen—Count or not—authored the supposed monograph about himself in 1946, said to be by one Gustav Regler. That is already an obfuscation. Here is the story. In his autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, Regler enthuses in no uncertain terms about the artist: I went to his studio to look at his pictures. There was something of Moby Dick in the lofty … Full Review

For many American art historians, Spain’s fifteenth century is a murky period better known for its religious oppression and explosive colonialism than for its manuscripts. With Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, Lynette M. F. Bosch introduces Anglophone readers to the era through an assiduously detailed study of two-dozen illuminated liturgical manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Toledo. Until now, these lavishly decorated books, commissioned between 1446 and 1495 by the prominent Toledan prelates Archbishop Alfonso Carillo y Acuña and Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, have been only scantily published and were available almost… Full Review

“Unless our reading takes us far away from the pictures, it will not lead us properly back to them.” So Edgar Wind (1900–1971) reflected in an early and abandoned draft of his introduction to Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Wind aptly encapsulated his method, which, it is sometimes forgotten, derived much of its Olympian energy and original character from deep attention to the language of form. “Iconography,” he continued in his draft, “is nothing if not what Focillon regretfully called un détour. The divergences should be pursued, the convergences distrusted… Full Review

Xu Bing is arguably the contemporary Chinese artist best known to audiences outside of China. Winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the subject of several one-person shows at small museums around the country, he has received worldwide recognition and has been the subject of several critical essays. Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing brought together several periods of the artist’s work for the first time in a major American museum exhibition. Like many Chinese artists living and working in a postmodern, global art world, Xu has had to engage with the question of shifting and multiple audiences for… Full Review

This book is the product of two interconnected developments. First, contemporary Mexican artists moving in the international art world are enjoying a lot of success, and while Mexican art is now no longer represented solely by the muralists, figures such as Santiago Sierra, Carlos Amorales, Minerva Cuevas, and Gabriel Kuri are reinventing the avant-garde of social intervention. This development has been paralleled in art history in Mexico by the emergence of a socially engaged, contextualizing approach. Some of this new work has been “social art history” based on thorough research of primary sources, but central to it all… Full Review

Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe hold an exceptional status as two of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century American art. Notwithstanding the shared distinction of their canonical positions, their art could not be more different. While Hopper produced striking iconic images of the American scene, O’Keeffe’s paintings are associated with the modernist, abstracted aesthetics of the first American avant-garde. In their own day, the artists themselves moved in distinct professional circles that did not overlap. Yet when viewed comparatively, Hopper and O’Keeffe’s images exhibit some surprising thematic commonalities, particularly concerning issues of gender and embodiment, intimacy… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Since this reviewer was unable to visit either venue, the following comments, perforce, concentrate on the only permanent record of the show, its catalogue. The catalogue is divided into two distinct parts: six essays with separate authors that treat different aspects of the exhibition’s content, and a series of eighty-five catalogue entries. The latter are not distinguished by author, but rather were the result of a “collaborative effort, reflecting the input of all those listed on the… Full Review

To write a book entitled The Arts of India must have been a labor even more daunting than to write a review of one. The Western reader might reflect on what it would be like to address “the Arts of Europe” between two covers. Admittedly this volume catalogues one museum’s collection, which might seem to require finite skills. In fact, that collection includes forms often entrusted to separate curatorial departments: stone sculpture (originally part of a building), bronze sculpture (created and set differently), paintings (originally viewed by readers and connoisseurs of diverse kinds), textiles (in a wide range of techniques,… Full Review

Charles Barber’s Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm sets out to explore Byzantine iconoclasm as primarily an art historian’s concern. The author writes: “In the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, the ideas in play around the icons and the emphases within these ideas were to change considerably. It is these changes that need to be addressed before iconoclasm can be shown to be either the cause or the effect of the shape of Byzantine political, social, cultural, or theological conditions of this period. This is work for an art… Full Review

Ancient Alexandria, in spite of its fame and importance in the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, does not come into focus clearly. Even the most rewarding discussions of Alexandria leave us frustratingly aware of the gaps in the historical record (see the recent Getty symposium documented in Kenneth Hamma, ed., Alexandria and Alexandrianism [Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996]). For this reason, Marjorie Susan Venit’s new book on Alexandrian tombs is of great interest. Venit shares her fascination with this compelling city and justifiably credits her subject matter as bearing “eloquent witness to… Full Review

In 1939, and in response to the massive Mostra Giottesca of 1938, Roberto Longhi wrote a sour, intentionally provocative piece that he curtly called his Guidizio sul Duecento, or judgment regarding the thirteenth century. In the essay, Longhi fretted that writers on medieval art had become so absorbed in establishing the authorship and origins of images that they had largely forgotten to act as responsible critics. They had thus also begun to forget that the majority of dugento works represented—in Longhi’s unshrinking opinion—tired and often-confused debasements of Byzantine imports. Using terminology that was all too common in Fascist Italy, Longhi… Full Review

Of all artists, Leonardo da Vinci is best understood through study of his drawings, as previous scholars such as Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Carlo Pedretti, Martin Kemp, and David Brown have amply demonstrated. Berenson went to the heart of the matter in The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (2 vols. [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1903]) when he wrote: The quality of qualities, then, in Leonardo’s drawing is the feeling it gives of unimpeded, untroubled, unaltered transfer of the object in his vision to the paper, thence, to our eye; while, at the same time, this vision of his … Full Review

This handsome and imposing volume, Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, seems destined to become a mainstay of every art historian and archaeologist’s library. From its arresting cover detail of a beetle-browed portrait head vessel—refreshingly not overrestored—to its international array of authors and brilliant images of the exciting discoveries from the past decade, this book presents new material for scholars in both fields to ponder. Color photographs, each one a work of art in itself, nicely accompany the beginning of each essay. Black-and-white illustrations and line drawings, 310 in all, superbly document the text itself. Form aside, the… Full Review

History has not been kind to the Brussels-born genre painter and portraitist Michael Sweerts. Despite having enjoyed patrician patronage in Rome and founding one of the earliest academies of art in his native city, Sweerts was disregarded by contemporary chroniclers of painting, and upon his death his name and achievements were quickly forgotten. When at the start of the last century the artist began to interest scholars and modern collectors, he was wrongly taken for Dutch. Later historians lumped him with Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti, those disparaged painters of the Italian popolo basso, much to his disadvantage… Full Review