Browse Recent Book Reviews

A voracious curiosity about foreign places, goods, and people has become a defining characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. K.J.P. Lowe’s new book Provenance and Possession: Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy reveals that we must think differently about this defining feature—especially as it pertains to knowledge about and interest in Africa. Three sets of heretofore unknown documents—registers, account books, and correspondence—penned by scribes at the Ospedale Degli Innocenti in Florence and Italian agents working for the Estes, the Medici, and the papacy in Lisbon form the basis of this rigorous and field-changing book. To be sure, Provenance and… Full Review

The first thing that strikes anyone who picks up Elizabeth Pilliod’s new book is its heft. With thick, glossy pages and rich images, Pontormo at San Lorenzo: The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece feels like a work of substance (and it is), but the study itself is not overly long. An introduction and five chapters add up to two hundred twenty-six folio-sized pages of single-columned text. Of perhaps equal importance are two additional elements. The first is an appendix with color-coded tables that map the descriptions of Pontormo’s lost paintings in early sources. The second is a… Full Review

This book explores how artists of the 1960s and 1970s drew inspiration from and critiqued the built environment—which encompasses everything from vernacular architecture and urban planning to significant engineering feats—in their sculptural and conceptual artwork. Bieber sets the narrative in mid-to-late 20th-century America, where optimism about progress meets disillusionment. The artists that the author investigates straddle these two outlooks; some, like Donald Judd and Robert Grosvenor were energized by new materials and big construction, while others like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Gordon Matta-Clark were pointedly critical. The goal of Bieber’s study in American Artists Engage the Built… Full Review

Amy Tobin’s Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation provides an important examination of artworks that emerged from debates among feminist artists across the US and UK during the 1970s. Richly researched, engagingly written, and compelling argued, Tobin makes clear the stakes of these historic works for contemporary feminist thought, placing her expertly chosen case studies in conversation with key past and present-day feminist writers throughout the book.  Focused on dialogues among artists of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Tobin offers a nuanced analysis of the challenges of feminist togetherness. Rather than broach “feminism” retrospectively, as a singular… Full Review

In a 1976 photograph, twenty-seven-year-old artist Željko Jerman kneels on the sidewalk in front of Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC), applying photo fixer to a large roll of photographic paper to write in stark, imperfect letters: “Ovo nije moj svijet” (“This is not my world”) in Croatian. The banner’s crude, handmade quality contrasts sharply with official messaging typical of public spaces, further highlighted by rough pieces of brick weighing it down. Soon displayed on the building’s façade before being promptly removed by gallery administration, the work raises provocative questions: What does this strange statement mean? How… Full Review

In Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture, Katrina Grant argues that the theatre exerted a significant but neglected influence on the design and experience of landscape in early modern Italy. In chapter one, Grant discusses the cliché that the arts of the seventeenth century were “theatrical” and suggests that if it is to have any value, this notion needs to be distinguished from modern ideas about the theatre and theatricality. Instead of platitudinous statements about the general “theatricality” of baroque works of art, and the simplistic categorisation of gardens according to the… Full Review

In Cristelle Baskins’s recent monograph, Muley al-Hassan, the Hafsid king of Tunis (r. 1526–43) and vassal to Charles V (r. 1516–66), finally gets his due. Long eclipsed by hegemonic histories of his Habsburg contemporaries, Muley al-Hassan commands the center of Baskins’s narrative of cultural entanglement and territorial contestation in the early modern Mediterranean. But as Baskins signals in the text, the book aims to do more than recalibrate our understanding of the relationship between its titular protagonists, the Hafsids and the Habsburgs. As she traces Muley al-Hassan’s displacement, itineracy, and mythologization across the long sixteenth century, Baskins draws on transdisciplinary… Full Review

How does one define an intervention? Through critical reflection and response or through rupture and renewal? In the words of scholars Jacqueline Francis, Jeanne Gerrity, and their contributors, an intervention should have all these qualities and more. Copublished by Sternberg Press and the California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth annual edition of A Series of Open Questions. The publication weaves twenty-nine entries, including previously published book excerpts, commissioned media, art, and experimental projects, into a profound meditation on Black feminist ideologies, critical making… Full Review

In Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945, Marika Takanishi Knowles investigates how art, theater, and commerce converge through a shared aesthetic of performance and surface display, enabling the negotiation of social identities. According to Knowles, a distinct dynamic emerges at the tail end of the seventeenth century, a “marketplace of theatricality as a form of social address” (2). The figure of Pierrot crystallizes this dynamic over the two and a half centuries covered by the book, a continuity all the more striking in this figure’s adaptability to shifting variables across time and historical… Full Review

Alice Tilche’s Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age is an anthropological study of museums and religious conversion movements as disciplinary techniques and resources that variously shape the lives of subjects amidst ongoing conditions of marginalization and dispossession in an Indigenously inhabited region in contemporary India. Drawn from research conducted over 2005–2017 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, home to approximately 8.9 million subjects who self-identify as Adivasi and/or Tribal, the book focuses on the Chhota Udaipur district, where Rathava Adivasis constitute the dominant Tribal community. Here, Tilche tracks how Indian discourses of Indigeneity articulated by non-Adivasi… Full Review