Browse Recent Book Reviews

The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures is a master narrative of the political life of art objects in China, from early Shang-dynasty bronze vessels to the “remnant collections” of the last Qing emperor now belonging to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and the Palace Museum in Beijing. While much of what Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott and David Shambaugh have to say about the relationship between art and authority is familiar, the study is the first to present an extended account in English of the travails of creating, compiling, and protecting a national patrimony in tumultuous twentieth-century China. … Full Review

This volume makes a welcome contribution to the study of Classical Athenian white lekythoi. These oil vessels, painted in polychrome on a white background, are known from more than two thousand examples produced from about 470 to 400 BCE. Used mainly as grave offerings in Athens and its territory, their function and funerary imagery link white lekythoi closely with Classical Athenian burial practice. In Picturing Death in Classical Athens, John Oakley’s concentration on the vases’ rich figural depictions fills a gap in the scholarship. Since white lekythoi first began to receive significant attention in the second half of the… Full Review

The record-breaking attendance at the recent Hokusai exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC (March 4–May 14, 2006) proves that at least one Japanese artist draws crowds as well as Monet. The focus of an exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1890 and countless exhibitions thereafter, more has been published on Hokusai in Western languages than on any other Japanese artist. In the postwar period, Richard Lane, Jack Hillier, and Matthi Forrer contributed the standard volumes on Hokusai in English. Then, beginning in 1990, Gian Carlo Calza, head of the International Hokusai Research Centre, spearheaded three… Full Review

A much-needed book in Japanese art history, Ikumi Kaminishi’s Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan, an analysis of the performative art of “picture deciphering,” or etoki, is also essential to anyone studying the uses of images in society. Covering the gamut of disciplines from art history to ethnography to religion, Kaminishi’s book is a good attempt at interdisciplinary practice and how that practice can be used to uncover the overlays of human imagination in the use of visual images. Kaminishi explains that once etoki is understood as serving as propaganda, it will… Full Review

In the last two decades, scholars in art history, cultural history, and American studies have produced a host of important texts examining the once aesthetically maligned decade of the 1930s, according it a dignified place in the history of American visual production. In expanding this historiography, scholars have developed new historical and cultural explanations for images, including their content, settings, and audiences. Armed with contextual methods, with postmodern identity theory, and highly sensitive to period culture, politics, economics, and institutional constraints, writers have interpreted murals, prints, easel paintings, photography, and design. In these studies we learn of the workings of… Full Review

Writing a catalogue raisonné has become one of the most thankless tasks in art history. The inseparable association of this type of scholarly publication with the traditional valorizing of the individual master (even when not labeled a “genius”) makes many readers look askance at such catalogues. Moreover, the results of one individual’s evaluative process of connoisseurship are often seen as overly subjective, not that the results of group connoisseurship, as with the Rembrandt Research Project, have fared much better. Yet the catalogue raisonné still thrives as a scholarly genre, and many—academics, curators, dealers, collectors, and amateurs—depend on its contributions These… Full Review

In this elegant publication, Victor Schmidt surveys small Tuscan panel paintings from the duecento and trecento in order to search for the answer to a single question: How did such works function when they were originally created? While a wide variety of such works survives from this period, they are largely without context; information on patronage and provenance for small panels is sparse, as is documentary evidence on usage. Schmidt’s most basic body of evidence is the panels themselves, which demonstrate a wide variety of type and of iconography Especially problematic is the lack of information on the patrons and/or… Full Review

As an exhibition, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector provided the unique experience of showing a substantial portion of Rubens’s personal art collection within his own house. When I visited the exhibition for the first time, a pail and mop lay inadvertently forgotten in a corner, further adding to the domestic atmosphere. Rarely is an exhibition as perfectly suited to its setting, and for this apt pairing the curators Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy deserve to be congratulated. The catalogue cannot duplicate the in situ experience, but it provides the important alternative perspective of tracking the transformation of the… Full Review

Recent history has witnessed renewed interest in the work and life of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), famous for the muted tones and graceful volumes that epitomize his intimate still-life and landscape paintings, unadorned compositions that defy association with a single artistic movement. Characterized as stubbornly solitary, Morandi filled his canvases with barren combinations of forlorn bottles, vases, and other miscellaneous containers, producing clusters of architectonic bodies that allude to cathedrals, sculptures, and even the human figure in images whose “ambiguity of figure and ground” arrest the viewer (103). The Bolognese painter’s subdued landscapes oscillate between meditative abstract floating… Full Review