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

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Deborah Kahn
Turnhout, Belgium and London: Brepols and Harvey Miller, 2020. 272 pp.; 200 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth €125.00 (9781912554362)
The subject of Deborah Kahn’s probing book is the way in which narration in eleventh-century France manifested social and political power in Christian kingdoms—in particular, the outward display of a saint’s life in figurative stone sculpture on one church’s exterior. The outstanding contribution of this book is its close reading of the vita of an obscure saint, Eusice, written by Letaldus of Micy (fl. ca. 990s–1020s) and printed here in Appendix I (with full transcription and facing English translation by Steven Burges with Bailey Benson). Kahn interprets the sculpted figural reliefs at Selles-sur-Cher through saintly visions and striking anti-Jewish characterizations… Full Review
August 17, 2022
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Alessia Frassani, ed.
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021. 280 pp. Cloth €118.00 (9789004467453)
A growing body of scholarship on Indigenous visual culture of colonial Latin America has come about since the Columbus Quincentenary. Much of it calls attention to the active participation of Indigenous artists, patrons, and other marginalized groups in the production and consumption of objects and images. Significantly, it challenges earlier scholarship in the field, much of which advanced the problematic idea that the European conquest of the Americas was successful in eradicating key aspects of Indigenous ideology, cosmology, and artistic practices. The eleven scholarly essays that comprise Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas contribute to this critical… Full Review
July 20, 2022
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Sylvia Houghteling
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 162 color ills. Hardcover $65.00 (978069121578)
In early modern South Asia the sale of cloth was the second highest financial generator in the economic market. As a commodity it was prized across the world. Moreover, it was an important status symbol, connecting the far flung outposts of the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). It is therefore surprising that a history of South Asian textiles from this pivotal period has never been written before now. Fortunately, what Sylvia Houghteling presents in The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is more than a straightforward narrative. Rather, it maps a history of a specific art form while offering a multilayered methodological… Full Review
July 15, 2022
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David Hemsoll
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. 352 pp.; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300225761)
Can we uncover the intention of the artist? With Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, David Hemsoll has written a detailed new volume that proposes a definitively positive answer within the domain of Renaissance architecture in Florence and Rome. His interest lies primarily in one aspect of the architecture of the period: its relationship to the antique prototypes that provided source material for many works. He posits, with infectious optimism, that a close reading of the full oeuvres of the five architects under consideration will permit “a full and detailed account . . . of how and… Full Review
July 13, 2022
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Mary Weismantel
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. 288 pp.; 66 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (9781477323212)
The visual culture of sex is a fundamental tool for studying sexuality among ancient societies. The study of sexuality is, in fact, also the study of social structure as it relates to the culture, history, and ideology of a society. The sexualized image is a primary source equal to text or oral tradition, and it should be analyzed carefully. Studying sexuality can reveal social features that could not be otherwise revealed, as demonstrated in the Barbara L. Voss and Robert A. Schmidt-edited volume Archaeologies of Sexualities (2000). Mary Weismantel’s Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots shows readers both… Full Review
July 8, 2022
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Barbara Johns
University of Washington Press, 2021. 192 pp.; 156 color ills. Cloth $39.95 (9780998911236)
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA, October 21, 2021–February 20, 2022
For many accomplished Japanese Americans in the aftermath of World War II incarceration, public visibility was a vexed proposition at best, and professional success meant dwelling somewhere in the shadows between celebration and forgetting. In the case of the influential Seattle-based painter Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956), whose career had cycled between obscurity and national recognition even before the war, this ambiguous status has persisted through at least two or three posthumous efforts to establish his significance. Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey, a fine recent exhibition and companion volume from the Cascadia Art Museum, may finally do so. … Full Review
July 6, 2022
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Andreas Beyer, et al.
Exh. cat. Basel: Foundation Beyeler, 2021. 400 pp.; 300 color ills. Cloth CHF72.00 (9783775746571)
In the latter part of 2021, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel mounted the most important retrospective exhibition on Goya in recent decades. Curated by Martin Schwander—who is also the editor of the catalog—and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller in collaboration with the Prado Museum, it gathered 181 Goya works, including seventy-seven paintings, fifty-three prints, and fifty-one drawings. It was a unique opportunity for those able to attend the fully booked exhibition, since many of the works have rarely been shown outside of Spain, and many come from private collections. This is the first retrospective exhibition of Goya’s work… Full Review
June 24, 2022
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Kristoffer Neville
University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; 15 color ills.; 65 b/w ills.; 82 ills. Cloth $89.95 (9780271082257)
In the opening pages of his recent survey of early modern Scandinavian art and architecture, Kristoffer Neville argues that “the Danish and Swedish courts were fully integrated in Central European culture and played leading roles in the larger region from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century” (6). Rather than emphasize the uniqueness of Scandinavian artistic production in this period, Neville’s project is to excavate an often overlooked unity between closely related territories that have undergone an artificial separation in the writing of German, Danish, and Swedish national art histories. By revealing the impact of the Scandinavian monarchies in the German-speaking… Full Review
June 21, 2022
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Mark McDonald
Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 320 pp.; 166 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9781588397140)
There can be a tendency to portray Francisco Goya—frequently celebrated as the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns—as an artist existing outside of time. Goya’s Graphic Imagination firmly situates Goya in his artistic and cultural milieu while simultaneously teaching us to look closely and marvel anew at the boundless imagination and technical prowess of his graphic production. The catalog’s associated exhibition (which this author did not see) drew from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s remarkable holdings of Goya’s graphic work with supplemental loans from the Museo Nacional del Prado, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New… Full Review
June 15, 2022
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Craig Staff
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 200 pp.; 20 color ills. Cloth $49.00 (9781789382884)
Painting, History and Meaning is an ambitious book that seeks to redress conventional understandings of temporality within the study of contemporary painting. Craig Staff takes his “interpretative framework” (4) from the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s notion that painting occupies several “sites of time” simultaneously. Staff seeks neither to replicate the arbitrary attitude to temporality apparent in some works of postmodern eclecticism nor to reduce painting to the linear history of progress inherent in modernism and modernist criticism. His approach is rather to construct an alternative that opens up the differences in time inherent in the object that is the painting. Drawing… Full Review
June 9, 2022
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