Recently Published Reviews

“Our task is not to invent but to continue,” Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres reputedly decreed. The sentiment takes vivid expression in his Apotheosis of Homer of 1827, in the Musée du Louvre. The painting features an immobilized assembly of icons—from Plato to Poussin, from Menander to Mozart—at the foot of the Greek bard, worshipful congregants in the church of classicism. Equating artistic greatness with subservience to ancient precedents, the work advances a vision of classicism that has remained remarkably entrenched in Western imaginations. Enter Classicisms at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. This delightfully iconoclastic… Full Review

In Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History, Caroline Fowler investigates how the printed drawing manual of the early modern period marked an important shift in European artistic pedagogy, not only by making drawing lessons available to a larger audience through the medium of print but by proposing a new course of study that centered upon the representation of the human sensory organs. Thus a page from a 1608 drawing manual by Odoardo Fialetti demonstrated how an artist could generate a representation of an eye through the successive addition of lines: first the eyelid, then the cornea, and… Full Review

Who owns antiquity? Opening with this deceptively simple question, Zeynep Çelik introduces the core project of her complex and wide-ranging book: to investigate the question from the origins of archaeology as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century. A historical perspective on this question then informs its continued invocation in current international debates regarding ownership of antiquities. More than merely passive witnesses of past human achievement or economic resources to be levied, “antiquities, the material artifacts of the discipline [of archaeology], became charged with meanings associated with empire building, global relations and rivalries, power struggles, definitions of national and cultural… Full Review

In June 2008, The Rossetti Archive “closed,” although the site remains accessible. What can a “closed” site reveal to scholars today? Much. As digital scholarship gains purchase in the field of art history, we should learn from pioneering projects such as The Rossetti Archive. Edited by literary scholar Jerome McGann, the archive began in 1993 at the moment of public access to the worldwide web and when McGann’s home institution, the University of Virginia, founded the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The project aimed to make the work of Victorian poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti… Full Review

From its first pages, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities asserts itself as a sophisticated, well-written, insightful, and important contribution to masculinity studies and studies of japonisme and East-West exchange. Christopher Reed guides his reader through a variety of spaces and times, including an examination of the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes in Paris in the late nineteenth century, Ernest Fenollosa and the circle of collectors and curators interested in Japan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston, and Mark Tobey and his peers in Japan and Seattle in the 1940s and 1950s. This wide-ranging grouping is diverse in terms of aesthetic values… Full Review

A series of international flags stripped of their color by Wilfredo Prieto framed the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s presentation of Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950. Titled Apolítico (Apolitical, 2001), Prieto’s gray-scale flags guarded the balcony of the second-floor gallery where the exhibition was on view, as if demarcating neutral ground for the oft-contested field of Cuban art. Visible just beyond Prieto’s muted palette, a burst of color belonging to over fifty posters dating to the 1960s and early 1970s boldly announced some of the original political and cultural aims of… Full Review

O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism brought together the American Georgia O’Keeffe and two Australians: Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith. Setting each artist’s work in its own tightly hung space, the curators (and there were many) presented an enticingly simple premise. In unison they stated: Here are three significant Modernists. Their work revealed to us rich similarities in ambition and productive differences in context and technique. Do you see them, too? With their premise established, the curators metaphorically retreated. Admittedly, one felt their presence in the subtle clustering of artworks, concise displays of ephemera, and minimal use of wall… Full Review

The obvious characteristics that distinguished Japan’s modern museums from older indigenous practices are permanent space, comprehensive collections, and a viewing public. While the pivotal research on the state-centric practice of “show and tell” has been conducted by scholars such as Satō Dōshin, Christine Guth, and Alice Tseng, Noriko Aso focuses on the discursive formation of museum-going publics within broader developments of exhibiting institutions. Tellingly, she opens the book with an illustration of museum visitors at the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum in 1940. Rather than showing a museum building or arrays of artifacts on display, this sketch vividly illustrates Aso’s argument… Full Review

Working Conditions, the recent volume of Hans Haacke’s collected writings edited by Alexander Alberro, reveals the artist’s preoccupation with a handful of concepts since the late 1960s. Chief among these are the ideological structures that govern a culture’s understanding of art; the mechanisms of the “consciousness industry,” of which the art world is a small but relevant element; and, more specifically, the ways in which governments, corporations, museums, and other institutional structures affect the lives of those involved—which is to say, everyone who is affected by those institutions (which is to say, everyone). The book sheds light on how… Full Review

Consider some iconic Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Many of them are set in rural environments. Fallingwater is embedded in a dense forest in the secluded southwest corner of Pennsylvania. Taliesin (East) overlooks a lush green landscape fed by tributaries of the Wisconsin River. Taliesin West sits on the dusty foothills of the Tonto National Forest outside Scottsdale, Arizona. Moreover, the design of these buildings seems to reflect and harmonize with their natural environment. They are consciously rural—almost anti-urban—styles. And this sentiment, suggested by Wright himself, has guided Frank Lloyd Wright scholarship since he was alive. Upon his death in 1959… Full Review

The works of art commissioned by ancient Maya royal courts captivate and confound. Hieroglyphic captions accompany images of kings, queens, and noble families, but ancient voices on gods, the cosmos, and epic heroes are idiosyncratic at best, opaque at worst. Intuition guided early scholarly interpretations, buttressed by colonial texts, such as the sixteenth-century K’iche Maya Popol Vuh, which seemingly held a wealth of analogous descriptions for colorful Classic-period (ca. 250–900 CE) characters. As decipherment has progressed in recent years, a clearer vision of Precolumbian Maya thought became possible, but considerable insights can still be gained from later stories on the… Full Review

Why is queer feminism not an established subdiscipline in art history or a more influential politic in curating, art criticism, or visual theory? Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, begins to answer these questions and to identify the problems this absence occasions or exacerbates. Twenty chapters by artists, scholars, and curators of different generations are framed by an introduction by Jones, an epilogue by Silver, and a first chapter coauthored by both that offers a genealogy of feminist and queer theory and activism in the Euro-American context from the mid-twentieth century to… Full Review

Since the glaciers of the last ice age receded, 11,700 years ago, humanity has lived under the stable climatic conditions of the geologic epoch known as the Holocene. Agriculture flourished during this period, and sedentary societies sprouted up around the globe. Yet a growing number of scientists contend that human-induced alterations to the biosphere, beginning with the invention of the coal-fired steam engine in the eighteenth century and accelerating through the atomic age, have brought the period to a close. Two centuries of burning fossil fuels, razing forests, and dropping bombs have transformed the earth so profoundly that humans no… Full Review

Margaret MacNamidhe’s Delacroix and His Forgotten World: The Origins of Romantic Painting seeks to revise the narrative of Romantic history painting in France by ascribing to the Salon of 1824 a much more transformative role than it has played in previous art historical accounts. MacNamidhe argues that the art criticism that the Salon of 1824 generated, not only regarding Eugène Delacroix’s provocative entry Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc. but also acclaimed paintings that have now fallen in oblivion, including Xavier Sigalon’s Locusta, Giving Narcissus a Poison Destined for Britannicus, Tests It on… Full Review

A central (and not uncommon) problem confronts the curator of a white-box gallery who wishes to exhibit the work of Lonnie Holley, an Alabama-born artist and musician typically described as self-taught or vernacular: how to present the work within the conventions established by this type of institution while also acknowledging that the artist’s animating presence is necessary to the artworks’ significance. As Bernard L. Herman argues in a persuasive essay in Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley, the catalogue accompanying a 2015 exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, “Performance stands at the heart… Full Review