Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick
Exh. cat. MIT Press, 2021. 344 pp.; 125 color ills. Cloth $44.95 (9780262044899)
Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, PA, May 8, 2021–April 30, 2022; Center for Architecture and Design, Philadelphia, PA, September 10–November 14, 2021; Mass Art Museum (MAAM), Boston, June 11–December 18, 2022
It is by design that many of the artworks in the Designing Motherhood exhibition and the chapters in the accompanying catalog originate from personal experience. After all, the embodied experience of birth, as either birthing or birthed people (or both), is one we all share. Yet the “things that make or break our births” have, thus far, received little attention—sometimes in their public recognition, occasionally in their design. The Designing Motherhood curators, design historians Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, felt we needed a “public reckoning with the designs that, for better or worse, shape experiences for all of us”… Full Review
December 21, 2022
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Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 240 pp.; 193 color ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780691206103)
Among recent contributions to Piranesi studies, Piranesi Unbound occupies a special place as a volume clearly aligned with the “material turn" of art history. The coauthors, experts on architectural drawings and prints, are implicitly and productively critical of the canonical type of art historical research, concentrating specifically on what classical art history has regarded as parerga—the technical, material, and economic aspects of artistic production. Utilizing variegated forms of writing, Yerkes and Minor draw the reader into the experience of a close study of individual material objects. From one chapter to the next, the narrative is liable to be interrupted… Full Review
December 14, 2022
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Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 806 pp.; 1066 color ills.; 172 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9780884024699)
Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, eds.
Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Harvard University Press, 2022. 512 pp.; 25 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780884024705)
In pre-Columbian art history, the Andes and Mesoamerica command almost all the scholarly attention. These more heavily studied geographical zones are outnumbered by the neglected ones—the Antilles, Isthmo-Colombia, and Amazonia-Orinokia, or AIAO for short. Is it simply the absence of monumental ruins, as some have suggested, that causes art historians especially to relegate these regions to the margins or is it the relative lack of archaeology on which we can rely? In fact, archaeologists have been excavating and accumulating data in these areas for well over a century and, over that period, some parts of the AIAO were not as… Full Review
December 7, 2022
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Stephen Houston, ed.
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 192 pp.; 67 color ills.; 49 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781606067444)
From the 1940s until the 1990s, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, all major and most minor archaeological sites from the Maya culture were plundered to meet the demands of the international art market. To name a few examples, Richard E. W. Adams recounts that starting in 1976 the deep jungle Maya city of Río Azul was targeted by an intense looting operation that eventually employed up to eighty diggers (Río Azul: An Ancient Maya City, 1999, 5). Von Euw and Graham recorded that in 1975, more than fifty looters trenches were dug at the site of… Full Review
November 30, 2022
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Tina M. Campt
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 232 pp.; 78 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (9780262045872)
Scholarship on the theory of the gaze explores the power dynamic within the act of looking and being looked at. The male gaze, the racist gaze, and the colonial gaze are analytical concepts that help us understand how representation is implicated in the construction of gendered and racialized hierarchies and systems of control. They also reveal how subjects resist visuality’s capture through processes of self-representation and aesthetic defiance. Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work… Full Review
November 23, 2022
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Gropius Bau, Berlin, November 26, 2021–March 13, 2022
Zanele Muholi presented the full breadth of the South African artist’s work to date. Muholi’s photographic practice attends to the Black LGBTQIA+ community and addresses sexual politics, racial violence, self-affirmation, and lesser-known histories. Originating at Tate Modern, the exhibition is an international feat, curated by Tate’s Yasufumi Nakamori and Sarah Allen with Gropius Bau’s Natasha Ginwala. In a video interview, Muholi opens with the statement, “What matters most is content—who is in the picture and why are they there?” In Zanele Muholi, the curators echo the artist’s sentiment, as Muholi’s photographic and multimedia series unfold throughout Gropius Bau’s ten… Full Review
November 18, 2022
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André Dombrowski, ed.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021. 640 pp.; 152 b/w ills. Cloth $185.00 (9781119373896)
Author’s note: This article capitalizes the movement of Impressionism only when transcribing a quotation or with deliberate emphasis in discussing the book’s definition of the movement. In its goals to transport readers “to the moment in history when Impressionism made beholders alert and uncomfortable” (7) and to offer a springboard for future inquiries, André Dombrowski’s edited volume Companion to Impressionism succeeds. Its thirty-four essays dive into single-object studies, scrutinize critical reception, and integrate transnational examples with a diverse set of methodological tools to analyze impressionism’s imbrications of the objective and subjective, the perceptual and the sensual, in rendering a world… Full Review
November 16, 2022
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Shigeko Kubota, Mayumi Hamada, Mihoko Nishikawa, Azusa Hashimoto, and Midori Yoshimoto
Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2021. 256 pp.; 131 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Paper ¥3410.00 (9784309291413)
Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, March 20–June 6, 2021; National Museum of Art, Osaka, June 29–September 23, 2021; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, November 13, 2021–February 23, 2022
The exhibition Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was the first large-scale survey exhibition since Kubota’s career survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, in 1991, and this catalog—recipient of the 2021 Ringa Art Encouragement Prize—attests to the extent that interest and research on her work has progressed. The reevaluation of women artists has been proceeding apace throughout the world. Designated the “mother of video art,” Shigeko Kubota has been a particular subject of reconsideration and was recently honored with an important focused exhibition Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality at the Museum of Modern… Full Review
November 9, 2022
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Joanna Pawlik
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 296 pp.; 48 color ills.; 55 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780520309043)
“Qui suis-je?” André Breton asks at the opening of his anti-novel Nadja (1928): Who am I? And then, a line down, whom do I haunt? It is a well-known and by now overdetermined couple of lines, which nevertheless, as much as the entire novel itself, have had a considerable impact on generations of writers, poets, and artists around the world since its publication. One deeply impacted group is explored by Joanna Pawlik in the second chapter of her book on the reception of (chiefly French) Surrealism in the United States from the 1940s onward: Beat and San Francisco writers. In… Full Review
November 4, 2022
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Rakhee Balaram
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021. 480 pp.; 75 color ills.; 125 b/w ills. Cloth $125.00 (9781526125163)
Rakhee Balaram’s Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism is a resolute rejoinder to an assumption within art history that radical feminism’s agitations of May 1968 are no longer relevant in a post #MeToo world. Despite the relatively short period covered by Counterpractice (ca. 1970–81), Balaram presents an extraordinary breadth of visual, literary, and historical material accompanied by a depth of research, significantly expanding current understanding of the myriad artists, movements, and practices in the decade after 1968 in France, with special attention to how artists were catalyzed by the philosophy of French feminist vanguards Hélène Cixous, Luce… Full Review
November 2, 2022
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Sarah Betzer
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. 272 pp.; 42 color ills.; 81 b/w ills. Cloth $124.95 (9780271088839)
When riding Line 1 of the Paris Metro you might encounter the Louvre-Rivoli station. As you exit the train you come face-to-face with antique statuary displayed in niches along the dimly lit platform. In the shadowy commotion of mass transit you may even notice the Venus de Milo stir to life among the crowd of Parisians and tourists. This contact between ancient sculpture (in fact, copies of works housed in the Louvre that were installed in the Metro in 1968) and that quintessence of modern life—taking the subway—has rich precedents, traced by Sarah Betzer in Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter… Full Review
October 28, 2022
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Lucy Bradnock
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 240 pp.; 60 color ills.; 19 b/w ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780300251036)
Lucy Bradnock’s No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud offers a reassessment of Artaud’s reception among artists in the United States (and particularly artists who could be grouped within the American avant-garde). Looking at the period when his work was introduced to the English-speaking world in the 1950s and tracing its circulation through informal networks and official publications, Bradnock deftly demonstrates the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of Artaud’s emergence in the United States. The result is a well-researched and highly readable reconsideration of his legacy and influence there. Artaud’s texts—often opaque and contradictory—offer fertile ground for artists, who can interpret… Full Review
October 26, 2022
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Rebecca Wanzo
New York: NYU Press, 2020. 256 pp.; 6 color ills. Paperback $29.00 (9781479889587)
The past two years have seen a comic turn in African American visual culture. From Jean Lee Cole’s exploration of the earliest forms of Black humor in the final chapter of How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920 (2020) to Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s analysis of contemporary Black comedy as a vehicle to expose and critique racial hierarchies in Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and to Richard J. Powell’s comprehensive examination of Black satire as a language of resistance in Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), there has… Full Review
October 21, 2022
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Sarah M. Miller
Toronto: RIC Books, 2020. 450 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth $34.95 (9780262044172)
A 1938 draft of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland opens with Abbott’s Brooklyn Bridge: Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn. The steel construction of the Brooklyn Bridge spans the image, forming a stark contrast to the old brick warehouse in the foreground. The disruptive horizontality of waterfront construction partially obscures the verticality of New York’s skyscrapers in the background. If skyscrapers and construction are emblematic of the march of progress, the image’s layers and obfuscations suggest that change is not so linear. Instead, Abbott compresses the past, present, and future within the flat planes of the… Full Review
October 19, 2022
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Basile Baudez
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 176 color ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780691213569)
Carefully rendered wash drawings in a variety of hues, prints enhanced by gouache and watercolor—the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw a progressive expansion of polychromy in architectural representations and are analyzed by Basile Baudez in Inessential Colors. Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe. Throughout his extensively illustrated work the author interrogates this phenomenon, which initially served to bring clarity to a building’s design and later engaged in a visual language intended to captivate the viewer. The field of study is vast, from Italy to the Netherlands, Great Britain to France, by way of Russia, Spain, or Germany. The author… Full Review
October 14, 2022
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