Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contextualizes the production and interpretation of Kara Walker’s fantastical depictions of slavery as produced in installation silhouettes, prints, and drawings between the years 1995 and 1998. Through five well-paced chapters, Shaw investigates the personal and art-historical origins of Walker’s art, analyzes three of Walker’s most dense and widely-circulated silhouettes, and addresses the passionate and complex reception to Walker’s challenging images. At the beginning of her text, Shaw reveals her own stunned reaction to seeing Walker’s artwork for the first time in 1997. Following her encounter,… Full Review

Crafting a useful and compelling textbook from the diverse, contested, and ever-mutating material and methodologies of any scholarly field constitutes no small task. The authors of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity are to be congratulated for the boldness and originality with which they approached such an endeavor, and their survey of the art and visual culture of the geographic region now known as the United States does indeed constitute, as the back-cover copy states, a “tremendous accomplishment.” The text presents a persuasive and rich portrait of the history of the arts in America on two levels.… Full Review

Heidegger’s Hut offers a full architectural analysis of a very simple structure, the philosopher’s retreat in Todtnauberg. As Simon Sadler says in his foreword, “This is the most thorough architectural ‘crit’ of a hut ever set down” (ix). Of course the hut would never have attracted such attention were it not Heidegger’s. The oral tradition that accompanied Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world (and perhaps elsewhere) involved rumors of the philosopher working at a remote mountain hut. Well before the 1980s, when the question of Heidegger’s Nazism became unavoidable for scholars, the legend that accompanied him was that of the… Full Review

This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward, writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania… Full Review

As “the first anthology to deal with the painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography of the 1930s in a hemispheric context” (xiii), this ambitious collection of fourteen essays makes a significant contribution to the vigorous literature of this seminal decade. While more than half of the volume is focused on the United States, articles take a Pan-American approach in considering work from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada. The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean with North America reveals remarkable cross-cultural commonalities that remind the reader that the borders demarcating the countries where these artists worked were more political than… Full Review

Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych is the scholarly catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by its authors for the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, in association with the Harvard University Art Museums. Complementing the volume is a second book, Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), which collects writings by thirteen specialists from the field of Netherlandish art history. The catalogue focuses primarily on material, technical, and qualitative issues contextualized by format and use, while its… Full Review

In judging a photograph, one distinguishes between the quality of the image and that of the object shown, and so it is with a literary anthology. American Architectural History, edited by Keith Eggener, is a compilation of essays published between 1981 and 2002 that presents a vivid and faithful image of the discipline today. What it reveals about that discipline is, of course, a different question altogether. American Architectural History was designed to free the instructor from the burdensome task of making a reading packet to supplement a survey text. One can do this with a set of… Full Review

Near the end of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he describes the effect of seeing a scene from Fellini’s film Casanova, in which the protagonist dances with an automaton. Barthes is overwhelmed by the beautiful simulacrum of a young woman, discussing how the combination of “desperate” inertness and apparent affection touched him in the same way as the “punctum” in photography. Mulvey recalls this scene in her book Death 24x a Second, as she engages in a dialogue with Barthes, for whom cinema was normally free from the elegiac effects that he described in photography. The project of… Full Review

At the outset of Reinventing the Wheel, Stephen Teiser recounts an episode from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim that sets into motion the primary theme of his study. In this episode, the British curator of the Lahore Museum and a Tibetan lama exchange views in which the former presents Buddhism as a sweeping phenomenon framed by the panorama of book knowledge, while the latter intimates that the true fruits of the religion are found more locally in one’s own awareness and experience. Likewise, the modern scholar must negotiate similar tensions in the study of Buddhist art. While the undeniable similarities of… Full Review

Georgia Inside and Out: Architecture, Landscape, and Decorative Arts follows the publication in 2003 of the First Henry D. Green Symposium—The Savannah River Valley to 1865: Fine Arts, Architecture, and Decorative Arts, also edited by Ashley Callahan. The symposium series is named in honor of Henry D. Green (1909–2003), who beginning in the 1930s established himself as a pioneer in the appreciation and study of Southern heritage, particularly Southern decorative arts. Under Callahan’s direction, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens brings a welcome focus on its home state. For decades the study… Full Review