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There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts' formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . . ), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . . ). Let's try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the category of “art” is in some non-trivial and useful sense universal, and (2) those who believe that universal “definitions” are either tautologous or too abstract to be useful. There may be other binary pairs of positions, but these three come to mind in reading through The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, an anthology of previously published work edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins. Morphy is a very well-known and respected anthropologist who was trained at the Courtauld Institute and writes on Australian aboriginal art (among other things); he is also director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research...
Federico Zuccaro documented the troubled early life, apprenticeships, and rise to fame of his older brother, Taddeo, in a series of twenty drawings acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 from Christie’s New York. An exhibition of these drawings, created in the 1590s, coincided with the publication of this book in which the drawings and accompanying poems are illustrated and placed in the historical and artistic context of sixteenth-century Rome. Two major themes recur throughout the volume. One is the prominence of not only Taddeo (1529–1566) as a central player among Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in sixteenth-century Roman life, but the presentation of Federico (ca. 1541–1609) as an equal. The second is the training of young artists in the sixteenth-century through the central role of disegno and the copying of masterworks from classical antiquity and Renaissance masters. The volume is organized into four major parts that follow a useful foreword by Getty director Michael Brand and an informative introduction to the project by associate curator of drawings, Julian Brooks. The first three parts are written by Brooks while the fourth, “The Historical Context,” consists of essays by Robert Williams, Peter M. Lukehart, and Christina Strunck. In...
Scholarly texts, from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) to Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), have played a pivotal role in theorizing culture, and specifically art, as a means by which to withstand and overcome the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernity in the West. In the past decade, the field of East Asian Studies has found itself undergoing a much-needed methodological shift whereby the intersection between culture, the economy, and nationalist politics is carefully analyzed. Through works that weave historical narratives with critical theory, such as Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), the field of Japanese Studies has moved in a direction that attempts to address the logic behind the rise of culture as a stable force that granted people access to concrete experiences that were immune to changes and social abstractions caused by capitalism. Kim Brandt’s Kingdom of Beauty makes a fruitful contribution to this direction in Japanese and East Asian Studies through a careful study of mingei (folk-craft) and its place and changing role in Japanese society from 1920 to 1945. The Japanese folk-craft movement was part of larger trend in which culture globally became...
There are far too few general books available on topics in Japanese art, and those who are intrepid enough to write them are insufficiently applauded for the difficult task. Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 is an excellent example of an overview of Japanese Buddhist art done exceedingly well. It does a laudable job of surveying Japanese Buddhist arts from the early modern period continuing into the present, discussing an important body of visual materials that until now has been largely overlooked. The intention of the book, Patricia Graham states, is to “suggest new directions for research and to stimulate news ways of thinking about Buddhism and its relation to the visual arts” (viii). She overturns previous assumptions about the declining quality of Buddhist art of the early modern and modern periods, and of the decreasing importance of Buddhism in Japanese society and its ability to inspire fresh works of art. As Graham shows, the military bureaucracy and other elites continued to support institutional Buddhism and its arts during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), even as non-elites became an increasing factor in Buddhist artistic practices. Both groups participated in the developing production of non-denominational visual materials as an expression...
This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was among the most significant structures through which people acquired and exchanged art of almost every kind before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The book’s focus on two-dimensional works may make a certain amount of sense in the Western canon, but it misrepresents the cultural history of acquisition in Edo-period Japan, where sculpture, calligraphy, lacquer, and ceramics were frequently held in higher regard and were more in demand than painting. Acquisition is still a useful text, but it is best read alongside recent publications that are not limited to painting and that directly explicate the centrality of the culture of tea in Japan’s...
Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively determine the significance we ascribe to them. The various scholars included in Things That Talk seek to articulate the ways in which things speak to us even if we are ultimately responsible for what they have to say. Daston writes: “Imagine a world without things. It would be not so much an empty world as a blurry, frictionless one: no sharp outlines would separate one part of the uniform plenum from another; there would be no resistance against which to stub a toe or test a theory or struggle stalwartly. Nor would there be anything to describe, or to explain,...
These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries) by a Titian follower. Humphrey‘s catalogue omits “paintings that appear to be largely or wholly by Titian’s assistants or followers” (28). Loh’s text constantly assumes a sophisticated scholarly audience that enjoys word play; Humphrey’s straightforward language is accessible to a wider public. Humphrey’s introduction (11–26) provides a clear narrative of Titian’s life, work, travels, and patrons, with a useful emphasis on the last aspect. The author states up front: “Some three hundred items are catalogued in the present Complete Titian, but if all the paintings that originated in his busy workshop were to be included, that already large total might...
When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu are senior scholars who have researched Courbet’s life and works throughout their careers. Author of the groundbreaking 1971 article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Art News 69:9 [January 1971]: 22–39, 67–71), Nochlin has published numerous books and essays and organized several exhibitions exploring the work of female artists and representations of women in art, including the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007 Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art exhibition, which she co-curated with Maura Reilly (click here for review). She was also co-curator, with Sarah Faunce, of the museum’s 1988 Courbet Reconsidered exhibition. Founder and managing editor of the...
Perhaps most famous in art history as Antonio Moro, a name he assumed while portraitist for the Spanish court of King Philip II, Anthonis Mor enjoyed a long career in the Netherlands, chiefly around his native Utrecht. In this extensive analytical study, Joanna Woodall restores to the painter his full career, including a serious output of religious subjects. Indeed, Woodall’s perceptive characterizations sometimes seem colored by a portentous wish to convey the ultimate seriousness and salvific purpose of his vocation. If Christian content enjoys extensive attention here, it arose with Mor’s origins, for he was a “disciple” (Woodall’s word, but based on sixteenth-century accounts) of Jan van Scorel, an earlier Utrecht painter whose sojourn under Pope Adrian VI in Rome (1522–23) prompted a later career of large-scale religious subjects with an Italian accent. Mor built upon Scorel’s earlier series of portraits (1527–29, after 1541) for a brotherhood of fellow Jerusalem pilgrims for one of his earliest pictures (1544; Berlin). But Woodall goes much further, ascribing to her protagonist a Michelangelesque titan, revised from the Last Judgment nude into a St. Sebastian in a landscape (1542; Rotterdam); in the process she claims for Mor an earlier trip to Rome (early 1540s)...
What happens when a discerning historian of urban public art is asked to join the administrative body responsible for regulating the very art that she has so shrewdly critiqued in the past? She writes a book that turns her gimlet eye upon her own endeavor, placing it in historical context while using the past to help explain the present. The Politics of Urban Beauty is the product of Michele Bogart’s service as the “lay” member of the Art Commission of the City of New York (ACNY) from 1999 (the year of her appointment by the Giuliani administration) to the end of her term as vice-president in 2003 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This agency was founded in 1898 with an unusual brief: it does not initiate or design public art but rather reviews proposals for projects—ranging from mail boxes to paving to monuments and public buildings—to suggest modifications or “disapprove” designs. For the last one hundred years the ACNY has functioned as check, arbiter, voice of taste, and advocate of quality in the urban streetscape. Bogart describes its significance by noting that while New York is known by its landmarks, “the city’s streets and built environment are equally crucial in constituting...