Recently Published Reviews

The story of design history, like that of art history, has often revolved around a series of important philosophies and innovations that are associated with prominent male figures. In Women in Design, Charlotte Fiell and Clementine Fiell have provided a valuable resource, a welcome addition to the literature of design history, filling in some of the gaps in the accepted narrative of the field by highlighting the role of women designers. Although the names of many of the designers covered in the book will be familiar to scholars, the details of their accomplishments and inventions and their roles within… Full Review

The Serpentine Gallery in London was recently the site of an important solo exhibition dedicated to the American artist and activist Faith Ringgold. The show was a welcome homage to an important figurative painter and craft maker, whose narratives have addressed issues of African American identity and gender inequality for half a century. The exhibition was small but exhaustive, offering examples of Ringgold’s work from the 1960s to the 2010s. By marking the traces of the artist’s commitment through her figurative works, the show enabled viewers to recount the narrative of her experience as a Black American woman in the… Full Review

In American English, “fancy” has come to indicate upscale and expensive, undercut by a sense of the pretentious, staged, and overblown. British English keeps closer to meanings employed during the eighteenth-century heyday of the word: as an adjective, to describe art, clothing, or goods inspired by an active, sometimes idiosyncratic imagination; or, as a verb, to express liking someone or something, literally to envision the object of desire within one’s own projected fantasies. In her deft introduction to this slippery term for the volume Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture, coeditor Melissa Percival describes “an aesthetics of fancy—a dynamic… Full Review

(Click here to view the exhibition website and related content.) The basis of the exhibition Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is just a blip in history: six weeks. That is the amount of time that the show’s central figure, Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), spent in the United States in 1804. But curator Eleanor Jones Harvey wants us to realize that this brief stay planted a seed of influence that was “immediate, sustained, and profound” (26). On the tail end… Full Review

This new selection of Carl Einstein’s critical and art historical writing, edited and translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, greatly expands the ability of anglophone scholars to grapple with one of the most consequential chroniclers of the avant-garde’s heroic years. Of the fourteen texts Haxthausen has selected for this volume, eleven are translated into English for the first time. They represent Einstein’s published books through successive revisions; reviews and topical articles on art, artists, museums, and purely conceptual matters; personal correspondence, where it bears upon such matters; and posthumously published manuscript material. Einstein is an intensely ruminative, ferociously critical writer whose… Full Review

By the mid-twentieth century, designers were no longer autonomous creators of autonomous objects. Through experimentation with film and multimedia and by transcending disciplinary boundaries, they became “manager[s] of epochal change” (11) in the technoscientific and social environments of the postwar world. Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era presents a history of midcentury media practice, pedagogy, and administration, looked at through the lens of the multimedia experiments of designer couple Charles and Ray Eames and their designing, filming, and knowledge-producing contemporaries. In their work, happiness was a mode of production that built toward a democratic life. Instead… Full Review

(Click here to view the online multimedia publication.) A bare stage; a single microphone. Concentrated applause, and then a young Anthony Braxton (blue cardigan, saxophone in hand) walks into the frame and takes center stage at the Walker Art Center’s 1980 New Music America Festival in Minneapolis. Leaning close to the mic, he opens his set with a circular motif, repeated and varied, varied and expanded, all the way to a first cadence marked by a slow, resonant vibrato. This twenty-seven-minute performance video, previously consigned to the back room of the Walker’s archive and library, is now available… Full Review

Christiane Hertel’s new book, Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy, is both immensely important and highly unusual. An expert in early modern art and culture, the author presents a volume of critical essays that not only explore Chinese influences in the German lands but also offer an analysis of and argument for a distinct perception of China and a different engagement with Chinese import art in Germany, relative to the rest of Europe. Her account is based partially on the observation that because the German principalities had no East India companies and no direct access… Full Review

On May 19, 1968, French president Charles de Gaulle met with his cabinet ministers to address the mounting national conflagration that had erupted earlier in the month, when university students around Paris instigated a mass protest movement. By mid-May, a general strike had unexpectedly transformed the movement into a serious threat to the economy and the state. In addition to violent street battles between protesters and police, there were now millions of workers in almost every industry walking off their jobs or occupying their worksites and making radical demands. The only statement by de Gaulle from the May 19 meeting… Full Review

Ruin sentiment, Henry James suggested, is something of a perverse pleasure, for it must be a “heartless pastime” that takes delight in desolation and destruction (20). So why is it, then, that ruins have been so frequently depicted and described, pondered and praised in Western art and literature? This is the question Susan Stewart pursues in The Ruins Lesson, her minutely researched and beautifully written study of the enduring allure of ruins and ruination in Western culture. Poised between preservation and obliteration, ruins represent both a presence and an absence that give rise to a range of complex and… Full Review

Flying buttresses are massive masonry structures wrapping around the exterior of (usually) a church: rows of robust uprights and bridge-like flyers form a lithic forest sometimes so thick it obscures the church itself. Developed in the mid-twelfth century in Île-de-France and quickly becoming an identifier of Gothic architecture, flying buttresses have been credited for their structural prowess. Little wonder that generations of scholars have analyzed how flying buttresses stabilize and support magnificent churches. For Maile S. Hutterer, buttressing is far more than a structural wonder. In Framing the Church: The Social and Artistic Power of Buttresses in French Gothic Architecture… Full Review

In Chinese-Islamic Works of Art, Emily Byrne Curtis takes us on a journey through China’s history, its relationship with the Islamic world, and its rich artistic heritage. The author not only describes artifacts showing connections to the Islamic world during the Qing period but also provides a detailed discussion of the historical and social context that produced such amazing works of art. Examining different materials—from glassware to porcelain, from cloisonné enamelware to snuff bottles—Curtis reconstructs a detailed history of technological developments in the imperial Chinese industry. By using works of art from international collections and archival sources (from European… Full Review

In Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America, Karen Benezra offers, with impressive theoretical sophistication, new grounds for understanding the criticism, experimental art, and design practices in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing mainly on the work of Oscar Masotta (Argentina, 1930–1979), Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1914–1998), Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico, 1943–2017), Tomás Maldonado (Argentina, 1922–2018), and Gui Bonsiepe (Germany, b. 1943), Benezra employs “dematerialization” to frame how debates over materiality were concerned with the capacity of art and design to generate social transformation; her approach stands in contrast to the more familiar use of the term… Full Review

In his important new book, Niko Vicario reconfigures how we understand Latin American art by mapping a set of relations among key protagonists from Mexico, Uruguay, Cuba, and the United States between 1933 and 1945. All prominent artists, curators, and cultural influencers, they participated in a vigorous conversation centered on economic policy, industry, and art. Vicario chronicles their interactions and the objects they produced in a narrative that revolves around David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joaquín Torres-García, and Mario Carreño. Nelson Rockefeller, as the patron responsible for the acquisition of a collection of Latin American art by the Museum of Modern Art… Full Review

(Click here to view the exhibition in English, or click here to view in Spanish.) To Tame a Wild Tongue: Art after Chicanismo uses the aftermath of the Chicano Art Movement (1960s–70s) as a point of departure to bring together over twenty-five artists active since the 1980s who explore the distinct yet interconnected sociopolitical paradigms of contemporary Chicanidad. This digital, collection-based exhibition invites us into an important conversation about belonging, resistance, and identity through a transborder perspective. To Tame a Wild Tongue explores the idea of cultural hybridity by considering how Chicanx and Latinx artists in the United States… Full Review