Recently Published Reviews

In 1977, when she was 57 years old, artist Lygia Clark decided to abandon art. For thirty-odd years she had been working through a series of questions concerning space, time, ontological perception, and experience, slowly refining each in a quest to “unite art and life” (Lygia Clark, “Lecture at the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura, Belo Horizonte, Fall 1956,” quoted in the exhibition catalogue, 54). Although not the first, or the last, avant-garde artist to arrive at this conclusion, Clark seems to have legitimately reached this decision after three decades of systematic research, in which she believed she had exhausted all… Full Review

Curated by the prominent John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) scholar Richard Ormond, the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents ninety-two works that depict members of the artist’s vast social circle. Spread across five rooms and organized chronologically by Sargent’s location, these images chart the ways in which the artist’s personal relationships and growing prestige afforded him substantial access to creative personalities who would influence his understanding of the arts. The Met’s display included a further gallery of immensely candid watercolors and drawings from their collections. These additional images productively served to highlight both… Full Review

Introduction Design is a rich word. Its core meaning is a plan, so it refers by extension to evidence of the activity of planning, such as blueprints, technical drawings, and sketches on the backs of envelopes. However, it is also used to refer to the products of the activity of designing, such as designed objects, systems, and behaviors. Design history encompasses the study of design in order to find out about the past, and the study of the past in order to better understand design. Here I will briefly sketch the development of design history for those unfamiliar… Full Review

In the early 1970s, a new trend emerged among the members of the Union of Artists of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Diverse groups of painters from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and the Russian urban centers of Moscow and Leningrad began to demonstrate a keen interest in photo-realism, producing large-scale canvases that mimicked the formal properties of photography, film, television, and other forms of mass visual media. Despite their prevalence, most of these works were not widely seen during the late Soviet period. As good standing members of the Union of Artists, the photo-realist painters received… Full Review

Much contemporary political art, however strong in conviction, feels resigned to an inability to affect the conditions it addresses: Ai Weiwei on the migrant crisis, Laura Poitras on surveillance, and Olafur Eliasson on global warming are proximate in 2016. Conversely, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center remembers a moment when people believed that art could radically alter society. Hippie Modernism is filled with over two hundred and fifty objects—posters, paintings, a geodesic dome, ephemera, inflatables, film, a pink PVC bodysuit. A great strength of the exhibition is that it makes palpable a sense of urgency… Full Review

Before viewing any of the artworks in the exhibition, visitors to Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) encounter a wall-sized, vertically oriented black-and-white photograph of a denim-clad Jackson Pollock, hammer in his back pocket, leaning closely to inspect the surface of one of his black enamel paintings. The painting he scrutinizes, Number 22, 1951, hangs in bright sunlight on the exterior wall of a wood-shingled barn. His forehead seems almost to touch the canvas as his body casts a gray shadow over the majority of its surface. A reproduction of this previously unpublished photograph… Full Review

Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, a group exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras for the Dallas Contemporary that consists of works made mostly in the 1970s by Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, and Cosey Fanni Tutti, is prefaced by stanchion signs warning that the show “contains strong adult content” and that “parental guidance + viewer discretion is advised.” After checking in at the front desk, I was told that due to the sexually graphic nature of the show none of the works on exhibit could be photographed. This is proof enough that the artworks on display… Full Review

Stella Nair’s excellent new study of the Inca royal estate at Chinchero, Peru, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero, examines the experiential aspects of this site in relation to indigenous ideologies of space and the built environment. The book is divided into chapters that consider Inca ideas of place and time; specific architectural features; the community that built Chinchero under the direction of the tenth Inca king, Topa Inca; and that same community in the shadow of conquest. The volume’s aim, as stated in the introduction, is the “philosophical and archaeological inquiry into… Full Review

The exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television offered objects and images meant to rise above the proverbial ambient static of TV—here figured literally as a wallpaper background—in an effort to argue for the formative influence of avant-garde art on the medium’s look and content in its early years. To be sure, the selections of television clips, furniture, artwork, and ephemera beguile and entertain, introducing young visitors to a bygone age of television and sending older visitors on a journey back to a Sunday night gathered with family around the modern hearth to watch… Full Review

Visual artist Seth Price’s Fuck Seth Price declares itself a novel. It claims this clearly on the cover: A Novel—with a capital “N.” While Fuck Seth Price is the artist’s fourth book, it is his first self-declared novel, though its qualifications to this identity begin to disintegrate even before one flips open the small volume’s die-cut cover. What readers find in the relatively short span of the book’s 122 pages is not a novel in any recognizable sense (though it makes minimal, perhaps token, gestures toward the narrative form), but rather a somewhat schizophrenic deluge of thoughts on art—and particularly… Full Review

China: Through the Looking Glass, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exploration of how Chinese dress and aesthetics have influenced the Western fashion world, has been a popular success: with visitor numbers topping 800,000, it has entered the top five of the Met’s most successful exhibitions, beating another recent and immensely popular fashion exhibition also curated by Andrew Bolton, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, and proving yet again that fashion in the museum sells. But does it advance a knowledge of how fashion and dress have mediated cultural interactions between China and the West? How does it answer the implicit… Full Review

Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell’s From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence, a long-awaited study on art related to the Humiliati (“humbled ones”), provides a fresh approach to examining the patronage of religious orders. Originating in the eleventh century near Milan, the Humiliati were officially recognized by Pope Innocent III in 1201 and the male branch suppressed in 1571, following the failed assassination of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo in 1569 that was attempted by its members. Rather than focusing upon a particular moment in the order’s history, the book traces the entire span of… Full Review

Posters have long occupied a paradoxical position in the history of nineteenth-century art. Despite their appearance at the center of many exhibitions and textbook studies of the period, posters remain mostly peripheral to art history’s disciplinary foci. Ruth Iskin’s The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s offers an important antidote to the exclusion of posters from substantive art-historical analysis. As her title asserts, “the poster” merits new consideration as a broad category and as a venue where the domains of “art, advertising, design, and collecting” meet. Rather than simply looking to posters for what they reveal about developments in… Full Review

Taryn Simon’s bibliography for Paperwork and the Will of Capital includes an 1816 volume by Scottish horticulturalist George Sinclair. His Hortus gramineus Woburnensis catalogues the results of soil and planting experiments conducted to enhance the performance and nutritive value of various types of grass cultivated for animal fodder. Plant communities composed of diverse species, Sinclair found, produce a greater yield than less species-rich plots. The implications of this discovery would ultimately extend well beyond the agricultural intentions of Sinclair’s work. Charles Darwin in 1859 reframed the Scottish gardener’s research as a key source for the theory of natural selection and… Full Review

Anthea Callen, a foremost expert on the materials of French painting, makes one of her core arguments at the end of this important book: “Painting is a craft and a science as well as an art” (266). In addition to craft and science, the book’s emphasis falls—emphatically—upon art as labor (the work of art), and it therefore closely examines the character and connotations of the visible painted mark. She views it as the index of an artist’s working methods and tools, but also the inescapable sign of the painter’s aesthetic, social, and institutional allegiances. The book’s remit thus exceeds the… Full Review