Recently Published Reviews

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we highlight Outcasts: Prejudice & Persecution in the Medieval World, a 2018 Getty exhibition reviewed by Patricia Blessing. Full Review

Fig. 1 “Dissertations in Progress,” Art Journal 22, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 168 (published under fair use) In spring 1963, Art Journal,1 published by the  College Art Association (CAA), featured a new section, entitled “Dissertations in Progress.”2 It was introduced by a brief caveat that described the list as “tentative and incomplete” while promising that it would be augmented in future issues (Fig. 1). At that time, the editors of the journal could not have foreseen that this particular feature, which included dissertations being written at only five universities,  would remain a persistent yet greatly… Full Review

Struck by lightning at his Philadelphia house in 1745, Benjamin Franklin’s friend Gilbert Tennent penned a sermon on God’s “Majestick Voice in the Thunder,” a warning to those disputing divine power over the wicked and the good. “Who can stand before this Holy Lord God,” Tennent wrote, “when once his Anger begins to burn?” Franklin himself was experimenting with electricity nearby, wielding rods and bells, harnessing invisibilities in less prophetic but equally noisy ways. The alternate poles of “enchantment or enlightenment” (ix), as Michael Gaudio’s brilliant new book argues, tacking between sensory deception and revelation, colored both men’s understanding of… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we travel to the Seattle Art Museum exhibition Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas in a review by Lacey Baradel. Full Review

The polysemous nature of the concept of race in the eighteenth century meant that while the term’s employment was widespread, its meaning was hardly fixed. Regardless, what united its many different usages was a consensus that it was defined by visual traits, thus making the visual arts one of the most important disseminators and delineators of racial information. As Anne Lafont states in her impressively researched and comprehensive L’art et la race: Race is indeed anchored in the body regardless of the will of those who are its carriers. . . . Its absence of categorical fixity during the… Full Review

Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler’s Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective tells the stories of forty-five female designers, artists, and architects who graduated from the renowned Bauhaus school of design, architecture, and applied arts. Each story offers an invigorating look at the artist’s process, exploring art and life as well as the confronting of self and society. The juxtaposition of these artists’ paradoxical dilemmas between individuality and cultural collectivity demonstrates that they deserve deeper understanding from us. They connect the Bauhaus to the wider world, as asserted by the authors—even though they do not clarify the specific ways such a connection… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. This week we revisit the exhibition Per(sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana with Jillian Hernandez. Full Review

Writing in 1964, the Algerian painter Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) identified “that day in 1910 when the Russian artist [Wassily] Kandinsky created the first nonrepresentational work” as marking the birth of “nonfigurative (or abstract) painting.” (Note: For the sake of consistency, I have used the exhibition curators’ transliteration of artists’ names.) Published in Révolution africaine, the National Liberation Front’s weekly newspaper, Khadda’s piece was the first of three artists’ statements titled “Éléments pour un art nouveau” (Elements for a new art), in which the authors grappled with the question of the role of the artist in the postindependence state. While… Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today’s highlight is Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, reviewed by Alison Syme. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. Today we spotlight Kate Flint’s discussion of The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead. Full Review

FROM THE ARCHIVE: This summer, caa.reviews is revisiting reviews that relate to the social issues of the present, at a time when the field is taking them up in renewed ways. First up, Erin Silver considers Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun by Jennifer L. Shaw. Full Review

A current and valuable effort in art history is the examination of a well-known topic with greater attention to the contributions of women and other marginalized individuals. This expansion of familiar narratives is grounded not in rewriting historical facts but in rehabilitating figures—whether they be artists, gallery owners, curators, or collectors—who have been largely or even entirely overlooked, not only to shed light on their accomplishments but also to establish a broader understanding of a moment in time, which allows for a deeper historical account. Christina Weyl’s book The Women of Atelier 17, focused on women artists working at… Full Review

The history of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers founded in 1960s Harlem, is documented and analyzed from multiple, beautifully blended perspectives in this important, substantial book. I had expected to study it after viewing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) exhibition for which it serves as a catalog. However, shortly after the exhibition opened, the venue was closed to the public, another museum casualty of COVID-19. Louis Draper, the founding member and mainstay of the collective, wrote in his history of the workshop: “‘Kamoinge’ is derived from the Kikuyu [a language of Kenya]… Full Review

In this monograph, Halle O’Neal investigates a genre of Buddhist painting known as “jeweled pagoda mandalas” (kinji hōtō mandara; hereafter JPM), which was popular in Japan during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Three full sets and a few lone examples separated from their original sets remain. At the center of these vertical compositions on indigo-dyed paper, a multistory pagoda appears surrounded by narrative vignettes from a popular sutra. The central pagoda is constructed from a transcription in gold of the very sutra that the painting features in the surrounding vignettes, in some cases with further embellishment in… Full Review

It is tempting for biographers of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to wax poetic about the artist’s supernatural talents and divine genius, but instead the Louvre’s blockbuster exhibition Léonard de Vinci offered a cerebral and technical approach to understanding the old master’s virtuosic oeuvre. Cocurated by Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre’s curator of paintings, and Louis Frank, curator of drawings and prints, this much-anticipated retrospective coincided with the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death. As stated in the wall text and accompanying booklet, the primary goal of the exhibition was to demonstrate “Leonardo’s revolutionary approach,” which “aimed to make painting a science encompassing… Full Review