Recently Published Reviews

In her latest book, Joan B. Landes tackles one of the French Revolution’s most recalcitrant iconographic paradoxes. How is it, she asks, that popular prints relied so heavily on female figures to embody notions of liberty, justice, and the French Republic at a time when the flesh-and-blood women of France were decisively drummed out of public political activity? She finds her answer in a deeply divided realm that she terms “graphic politics,” where visual and political rhetoric interacted to produce citizens of the newly imagined French republic. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France… Full Review

Who knew? Certainly there were documents from the sixteenth century around the publishing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp that mentioned payments to artists who added color to intaglio prints. At the same time in Germany, a quite respectable living was made in the print trade by individuals known as Briefmaler, or print colorists, who were included among the depicted professions in Jost Amman’s Book of Trades (Frankfurt, 1568). Not to mention all those surviving woodcuts from the earlier fifteenth-century, which were almost always religious images of Christ and the saints and were almost inevitably colored, especially with vivid… Full Review

Several publications released in the past decade have reinvigorated studies of Leonardo da Vinci and, more specifically, have spurred an ongoing critical reappraisal of his early work. Thorny matters, including the nature of his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, the range of his experience before entering into that master’s workshop, his delayed matriculation in the Florentine painters’ guild, and--perhaps the slipperiest question of all--how the young artist struggled to find his own style, have been addressed in a groundswell of articles, exhibitions, and monographic studies. Even as the exotic legends surrounding his biography are debunked and the theme of his… Full Review

While a number of recent exhibitions have examined Symbolist art in a European context, Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany 1870–1920 was the first international show to focus exclusively on German art from the turn-of-the-century period.[1] Despite the inclusive parameters in its title, most of works included date from the Wilhelmine period (1890–1914). Coorganized by the English art historian, Simon Reynolds, and Ingrid Ehrhardt, curator at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, Kingdom of the Soul presented almost two hundred works of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts to audiences in Germany, England, and Sweden. Since many of these nearly seventy artists… Full Review

The “Pagan Fables” in Dutch Painting of the Golden Age: Narrative Subject Matter from Classical Mythology in the Northern Netherlands, ca. 1590–1670 is not the first publication of Eric Jan Sluijter’s groundbreaking dissertation on the representation of Ovid’s fables in Dutch painting. Many cherish their copy of the privately produced 1986 edition, with its stamp-size images and unglued pages. Even then Ivan Gaskell expressed the wish that this low-cost issue would soon be followed by a commercial edition, preferably in English. With the present volume this desideratum has been partially fulfilled. Its large format accommodates the original text and leaves… Full Review

Francesco Caglioti has written a masterful pair of volumes that transform our knowledge about Donatello’s bronze sculptures, the David and the Judith and Holofernes, and consequently our understanding of quattrocento (and cinquecento) Florentine sculpture. The author supports his arguments with an impressive array of documentary discoveries, evidence culled from unpublished contemporary sources, and careful rereading of well-known writers like Giorgio Vasari. Caglioti is equally skilled in stylistic analysis and shows a prodigious command of Renaissance works of art. Despite the focus indicated by the book’s title, its range is in fact much broader, including a… Full Review

Jörg Breu the Elder (ca. late 1470s–1537) was a leading artist working in Augsburg, Germany, which along with Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg became one of the primary commercial centers in the Holy Roman Empire. Breu’s career (and with it Augsburg) certainly has received new life in the past several years, with Andrew Morrall’s recent book complementing Pia Cuneo’s monograph, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identity, ca. 1475–1536 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For both writers, Breu’s work is rich in meaning, interacting creatively with the particular circumstances of Augsburg, while also raising… Full Review

Despite the proliferation of critical discussion accompanying the body of work known as contemporary Chinese art, there has been little, if any, attention accorded to art produced in Hong Kong. In David Clarke’s new survey, however, he attempts to remedy this situation by introducing a wide array of artists in Hong Kong who operate under what he asserts as “hybridity.” A professor of art history at Hong Kong University and an active scholar on Hong Kong art, Clarke has followed up on his previous work, Art and Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective (Hong Kong: Hong Kong… Full Review

Ever since Michel Foucault reintroduced Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century panopticon into contemporary philosophical discussion in 1975, the project has served as the prototypical example of surveillance and social control in the modern world. The panopticon is both an architectural model--a circular prison engineered to create the semblance of constant prisoner surveillance--and an example of rationalist philosophy--Bentham rejoiced in the belief that prisoners under the potentially omnipotent surveillance of prison guards would learn to self-censor their behavior, or, in more Foucauldian terms, to internalize the disciplinary gaze. As suggested by its title, CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother… Full Review

David Lomas's meditative study is a résumé of the role of psychoanalytic theory in Surrealism in several ways: as the writing of Sigmund Freud and others was consciously adapted by the Surrealists for their various intellectual ends; as psychoanalytic theory was used to produce the iconographic art history of Surrealism; and as contemporary psychoanalytically-inflected theory (that of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, and Judith Butler) elucidates, and implicitly retroactively legitimates, the projects of Surrealism. Lomas has adopted a focused format: each chapter addresses one artist's work as a way into one psychoanalytic term… Full Review

In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), T. J. Clark imagines the bewilderment of a future archaeologist trying to reconstruct the history of modern art from four fragments: Adolph Menzel’s Moltke’s Binoculars (1871); John Heartfield’s A New Man, Master of a New World (1934); Pablo Picasso’s Italian Woman (1919); and Kasimir Malevich’s Complex Presentiment (Half-Figure in Yellow Shirt) (1928–32). This game sets up Clark’s analysis of “modernism’s changes of face: its inward-turning and outward-reaching; its purism and opportunism; its centripetal and centrifugal force” (Clark 407). One way… Full Review

Fukuda (Haritsu) Kodōjin (1865–1944) was part of the long tradition of Japanese literati poet-painters. While the Chinese literati ideal as it was understood by Japanese painters and poets of the nineteenth century was not particularly concerned with popularity or communicating to the masses, by Kodōjin’s time it must have been clear that the tradition had become an artifact of an earlier era. Was he a last great figure expressing himself in the centuries-old manner of the Chinese literatus, or was he a stubborn Luddite resisting the inevitable changes that were guiding Japan into the modern age? Was his art a… Full Review

Sybil Gordon Kantor’s book is an important contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century American art: It is intellectual and biographical history at its most rigorous. Kantor has scoured archives and primary sources to tell a story of the emergence of modernism in the U.S. through one man who was nevertheless the product of other men and women who had influenced him through their ideas, collections, and personal contacts. As today’s critics and historians bid farewell to modernism as an idea, Kantor’s book reminds us that even though ideas might be defeated or abandoned in the seminar room or at the… Full Review

The Murthly Hours is a little-known and, until recently, little-studied manuscript of the late thirteenth century. Probably produced in Paris, it had found its way to Scotland by the early fourteenth century. The manuscript appears in a number of nineteenth-century inventories of Scottish collections, but its whereabouts were unknown to modern scholars until its rediscovery by John Higgitt in 1980. It was acquired by the National Library of Scotland in 1986 (MS 21000). Higgitt’s recent study of the Murthly Hours is, first of all, an extended catalogue record of the manuscript. The author describes every aspect of… Full Review

The Victorian Nude was an unusual choice for the inaugural exhibition at Tate Britain since it treated a subject rarely identified with nineteenth-century British culture. After all, despite a pile of books in recent years revealing the scope of Victorian sexuality, the popular correlation between prudery and the Victorian age remains strong. By choosing the saucy word “Exposed” for the exhibition’s title, the museum drew attention to the subject’s previously neglected character and to its inevitable prurient associations. In fact, the Victorian nude has been the focus of scholarly attention in surveys of Victorian art and in the many… Full Review