Browse Recent Book Reviews

In her important work, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, Deborah Deliyannis provides a detailed synthesis of the available material on Ravenna from the Roman period through until AD 850. As she briefly mentions at the end of her review of earlier scholarship, “There has as yet been no sustained scholarly treatment of Ravenna, in English, and this book is intended to address that void” (13). Deliyannis does exactly this, combining textual, archaeological, and artistic evidence in a clear and sophisticated way for readers who were perhaps put off by the extensive German text of F. W. Deichmann’s earlier synthesis (F… Full Review

It is not a coincidence that these three recent publications on photography in China all begin with a lament on the obstacles involved with studying this subject. Indeed, since there is rarely a concentrated archive of photo studios or photographers in China, information can only be gleaned from newspaper advertisements, travel writing, correspondence, and ephemera. Actual photographs are not abundant either, as political chaos over the past century resulted in their significant loss and destruction. The extant photographic materials in Chinese public collections are generally inaccessible; those in private collections are increasingly visible, thanks to the popular Old Photographs series… Full Review

In my first Native art history class in the mid-1990s, my professor introduced the work of Carl Beam, theretofore unknown to me. She presented Self Portrait in My Christian Dior Bathing Suit (1978–1980), which depicts the artist in a Speedo-style swimsuit, standing legs apart with one hand on his hip and inscribed with a handwritten statement expressing his authority and claim to the work. It conveys humor, irony, incisiveness, and defiance. To my mind, then gripped by postcolonial and feminist cultural critiques, the painting crystallized issues of representation and refusal, and did so in beautifully executed washes of watercolor. I… Full Review

Among the most fanciful objects commissioned by the French monarchy is a pair of Sèvres porcelain pails designed for Marie-Antoinette’s pleasure dairy at the Château de Rambouillet. They are shaped like tinettes—wooden buckets used on ordinary dairy farms for making fresh cheese—and painted with wood grain to imitate their rustic models. Like Marie-Antoinette’s mock hamlet at Trianon, the Rambouillet pails are outlandish inventions of the pastoral movement in literature and art, which celebrated naturalness with contrived theatricality. As the ill-fated monarch so cruelly experienced, bourgeois sensibilities soon lashed out at this noble ostentation. To pre-Revolutionary critics of the society… Full Review

Sumptuous in format and timely, given recent attention to European-Ottoman exchanges, the four volumes considered here benefit from Erik Fischer’s lifelong engagement with Melchior Lorck (also Lorichs), the scholarship of Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and a contribution by Marco Iuliano. Volume 1 consists of a complete survey of the artist’s oeuvre in the form of thumbnail images, a biographical essay, and documents. The second and third volumes consist of a facsimile of The Turkish Publication, published posthumously in 1626, and a catalogue raisonné, with woodcuts, engravings, drawings, and paintings generated from the artist’s sojourn in Istanbul… Full Review

The title of Elizabeth Siegel’s Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums derives from an unsigned article, “Photomania,” published in Harper’s Weekly (February 16, 1861), and cited by Siegel as evidence of the popular appeal of the carte de visite album in the United States. As the article crowed, the album sold by savvy “makers of fancy goods” was allowing collectors of cartes de visite “to create their own ‘gallery of friendship and fame.’” The mania for albums was widespread, “making them ‘quite universal, and as fast as they are brought to us are taken… Full Review

“Why Rajput paintings look the way that they do” is the enormous concept that Molly Emma Aitken addresses in The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. Fortunately for readers entering into her innovative and complex thinking, Aitken is especially gifted in her word choice, graphically evocative, and the book is filled with well-reproduced images of stunning Rajput paintings. Her descriptions of the paintings and the artists who produced them give both the seasoned scholar and uninitiated reader a series of intriguing ideas to ponder. Aitken’s premise is concisely explained in her introduction: conventions used in Rajput painting… Full Review

The issues at stake in Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts could not be more pressing. Published in 2008, this short overview of America’s government, university, corporate, and private donor-based arts patronage structures—together with some of their European precursors and global alternatives—arrives at a moment when the House Republican Study Committee (among others) has proposed the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the governors of Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina are advocating a complete defunding of the arts at the state level. It is precisely this context, however, that makes it difficult to embrace Garber’s… Full Review

Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna D’Souza, in considering MoMA’s feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a “site for community-building and for the utopian… Full Review

If Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) can be called the “Father of the Comic Strip,” then David Kunzle is surely its godfather, for it is to him that we owe the establishment of the comic strip as a subject for scholarship. His two-volume History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–90), today a collector’s item, is still unsurpassed as the basic text about this art form, and he has now published two additional books that also are destined to become basic reference works. The first, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, is a monograph on the artist… Full Review