Recently Published Reviews

J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s works produced from 1835 to 1851, from the time he was sixty years old until his death at seventy-six—the period when Turner was consciously shaping his legacy and producing the mature oils and watercolors that have so heavily influenced modern art concerned with light and color. Sam Smiles, Tate Research Fellow and associate professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, took the lead in conceiving this groundbreaking exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors to promote the idea that Turner… Full Review

Chika Okeke-Agulu’s thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria significantly advances an understanding of modern African art. He considers a key time period in Nigerian art history, from the late 1950s eve of independence (Nigeria gained its independence in 1960) to roughly 1968 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The term “postcolonial modernism,” Okeke-Agulu rightly insists, means that the artistic developments of this time cannot be disentangled from prevailing nationalist ideologies. He sees postcolonial modernism as an “international phenomenon,” and throughout the book highlights the connections of Nigerian ideas and… Full Review

In 1960, Dominique and John de Menil instituted a project to study images of persons of African descent in Western art. As Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby note in the introduction to their edited volume, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, that project, which began as a photographic archive, was initiated in response to segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. The Menil’s undertaking eventually culminated in a series of five books, republished by Harvard University Press, along with three new volumes, the last appearing in 2014 (click here for review)… Full Review

In Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, Mechtild Widrich examines the relationship of embodiment, memory making, and especially documentation to the meaning of monumental, performative, and audience-oriented art in post-World War II Europe. Ranging from former Yugoslavia to Austria and a split Germany during the Cold War, Widrich expertly discusses artists from each region, including VALIE EXPORT in Vienna, Marina Abramović in the former Yugoslavia, and Joseph Beuys in Germany. Widrich’s art-historical exegesis of these artists’ works and the history of their reception leads to a sophisticated and deft unfolding of historical events alongside analyses of documents, photographs… Full Review

Unlike many of Ann Hamilton’s exhibitions with their patient interest in the singular object or action accumulated as increment, the common S E N S E contains a disorienting array of objects, actions, and modes of address: flatbed scans of dead animals printed in multiples on newsprint, hung salon-style; artifacts such as books and toys that document the ubiquity of animal imagery in various cultures’ childhood imaginaries; wool blankets hung low on wooden rods that one is invited to take and use; a vast hall of electro-mechanical bullroarers sounding in algorithmic arrangements. In other words, her exhibition seems to want… Full Review

The Great Purge carried out by the Stalinist authorities between 1936 and 1938 resulted in a widespread hunt for so-called enemies of the people. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the secret police organization best known by its Soviet acronym, NKVD, persecuted hundreds of thousands of individuals for their alleged involvement in anti-Soviet activities. The reverberations of the purge were felt throughout the Soviet Union. Museum personnel were instructed to collect the works of artists condemned as anti-Soviet, as well as any object that bore traces of formalism, a loose, fluctuating term used by administrators to signal a reliance on… Full Review

Time and again it is declared that photojournalism is in crisis—that neither its truth claims nor its purported humanitarianism carry much currency in today’s hyper-mediatized, post-indexical world. Critics commonly hold that our era’s wholesale mistrust in photography’s veracity and its ability to straightforwardly incite “empathy and compassion” has rendered photojournalism “fatally compromised or exhausted” (2). Indeed, in a climate where claims such as, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” (Karl Rove), become prescriptive, and what passes for news is driven by political and market forces, conventional photojournalistic images have little purchase in terms… Full Review

Maarten Delbeke’s The Art of Religion examines the relationship between the art theory of seventeenth-century Rome, particularly as it might apply to the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini and the writings of the Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino (1607–1667), confidant of popes Urban VIII, Innocent X, and especially Alexander VII, who made him cardinal in 1659. Pallavicino’s direct involvement with art and architecture was limited, and his writings refer only occasionally to the visual arts or artists (including Bernini), but Delbeke makes a compelling case for the relevance of Pallavicino’s work and more generally for a broader conception of art theory that acknowledges… Full Review

Very few artists become targets of a public controversy or scandal over a work of art. But for those who do find themselves in such a predicament, it can have a lasting impact on their careers. In this media-dominated age, a public outcry over someone’s art usually becomes an identifying marker for that artist, if not of the artist’s own identity. And if the incident occurs in one’s formative years, then the artist faces an especially arduous task of ensuring that her or his work from then on is not defined by the controversy. In 1999, Chris Ofili… Full Review

David Cateforis’s Rethinking Andrew Wyeth—an anthology of new and republished essays by well-known scholars of American and modern art—will prove invaluable to anyone studying the work or life of this controversial artist. Sturdily constructed and beautifully presented by the University of California Press, its 107 high-quality images (91 in color, 16 in black and white) illustrate nine individual texts, which are prefaced by an editor’s introduction and followed by a compilation of survey data from two major exhibitions of Wyeth’s works (one from 1973, the other from 2006). Two of these nine essays have previously appeared elsewhere and… Full Review

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held a show entitled Latin American Architecture since 1945 that defined the parameters of how modern architecture in Latin America would be read. In the accompanying catalogue, curator Henry Russell-Hitchcock highlighted important points concerning architecture produced over the past decade in the region, addressing its protagonists, relationship to history and the visual arts, construction and use of reinforced concrete, and influences (Latin American Architecture since 1945, exh. cat., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). In his analysis, the work was a “late comer” (61), had no great architectural “leaders,”… Full Review

A black, square Sony Trinitron TV. Headphones. On stage, a woman in her thirties holds a mic. Three men watch from a table. “The only smile in the history of art that we know is the Mona Lisa’s,” she says, “and we all know what kind of smile is that: it’s the smile that you put on when you wake up and your parents have shaved your eyebrows” (my transcription). Kasia Fudakowski’s Smile (2011) occupies a central space in the first gallery of Laugh-in: Art, Comedy, Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). This video documentation of… Full Review

Meredith Gill’s Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy sets ambitious goals. She states that “in studying angels we are . . . always studying the big questions, whether these may be about the nature of existence; about humankind’s relation to the supernal; about the identity of language, or the definitions of ‘place,’ ‘hierarchy,’ ‘metaphor,’ or ‘love.’ Studying angels . . . makes available to us the imaginations of artists as they grapple with the marvelous problem of representing the invisible” (14). As Gill explains in her introduction, in their theological essence angels were incorporeal and… Full Review

Upon entering the Los Angeles iteration of French artist Pierre Huyghe’s touring mid-career retrospective, curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) by Jarrett Gregory, viewers were given two things. The first was an introduction in the form of a performative artwork titled Name Announcer (2011). A bow-tied gentleman (at least it was a man every time I visited) asked your name and then would repeat whatever you said in a booming, officious tone as you crossed the threshold into the exhibition, whether or not there was anyone else around to hear. The second was an… Full Review

Basquiat and the Bayou is a catalogue accompanying the exhibition of ten works by Jean-Michel Basquiat held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Its contributors attempt to expand an understanding of Basquiat’s art by locating it within an African diasporic identity via interpretations of a selection of his Southern-themed works. Curator Franklin Sirmans’s essay, also titled “Basquiat and the Bayou,” is essentially an exhibition review. It describes works that reference the Mississippi River, religion, jazz, and zydeco, implying a thematic relationship among them that he does not fully detail. Sirmans visualizes Basquiat “meditating on the… Full Review