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

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Susan Foister
London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 320 pp.; 40 color ills.; 180 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300102801)
No one would mistake an artist with a name like Hans Holbein for an Englishman. Yet, as Susan Foister’s new book sets out to demonstrate, Holbein the Younger not only flourished during his tenure in England but also produced works integrally connected to the artistic context of the Tudor period. In Holbein and England, Foister hopes to revise common assumptions by reframing the artist geographically, arguing that Holbein’s experiences in Germany informed his English work and that early-sixteenth-century England was no backwater for the visual arts Misconceptions and unfamiliarity have assured a dearth of literature about English art of… Full Review
June 14, 2005
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Andrea Longhi, ed.
Milan: Skira, 2004. 264 pp.; 176 b/w ills. Cloth €32.00 (8884912571)
The sacrament of baptism is the most fundamental initiation rite of Christianity. In the earliest centuries of Christian worship, it was a lustration that welcomed new converts into the church. During the Middle Ages baptism was typically performed only on Easter and Pentecost; rules that the rite should be performed during these two feasts held sway until the twelfth century. Baptism, like most rituals, evolved gradually over time, and eventually it assumed a new significance linked to the notion of salvation rather than conversion. By the eleventh century, the ritual was performed not only on Easter or Pentecost, but also… Full Review
May 25, 2005
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Anthony Alofsin
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. 320 pp.; 20 color ills.; 250 b/w ills.; 270 ills. Cloth $60.00 (0393730484)
Much history penned by the American generation that came of age during (and since) the 1960s deploys the narrative mode of a struggle between two binaries. Anthony Alofsin’s new history of design education at Harvard University goes so far as to include the word in its title. For Alofsin, the study of what is one of America’s leading institutions for architecture, landscape, and planning education revolves around a struggle for modernism. Importantly, the ultimate outcome of that skirmish was not the various attitudes that followed modernism, sundry posts, and their ilk, but instead an essential hijacking of America’s inevitable professional… Full Review
May 25, 2005
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Hal Foster
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 473 pp.; 15 color ills.; 121 b/w ills. Cloth $38.00 (0262062429)
Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods is a Lacanian-driven contribution to art history and theory. The book does not address problems in the writing of art history, for example, why such writing is prone to monumentalizing artifacts or is crucial in canon formation. Instead, it uses theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to quarantine modern art and art history by taking the special interpretive codes of Freud, and then Lacan, and transferring them to a general code of interpretation. Prosthetic Gods historicizes art history through Lacanian theory. This strategy produces a circularity in which an object, an interpretation thereof, and institutional… Full Review
May 10, 2005
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Leslie Carlyle
London: Archetype Publications, 2001. 592 pp.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $140.00 (1873132166)
Manuals and instructional handbooks for artists have been in existence at least since Pliny the Elder’s discussion, in Book 35 of his Natural History, of the history of painting and its materials. Their numbers increased in the twentieth century, as shown by the volumes now in print and by the large number of instructional articles in “popular” artists’ magazines—as opposed to the academic or “serious” artists’ press, where there is either no instruction or, if I may say so, disdain for such a thing. As Leslie Carlyle points out in The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction… Full Review
May 4, 2005
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Edward Dimendberg
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 352 pp.; 61 b/w ills. Paper $29.50 (0674013468)
Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity analyzes the logic and history of the modern metropolis through the eyes of its most faithful disciple and staunchest critic, the postwar noir film, especially its B variation, where “[t]he loss of public space, the homogenization of everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent” (7). In the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer, Dimendberg is interested in the common, the everyday, and the epiphenomenal, expressions of mass culture that lend us insight into the unconscious logic of late-capitalist reason… Full Review
April 27, 2005
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Nicola Courtright
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 344 pp.; 10 color ills.; 244 b/w ills. Cloth $113.00 (0521624371)
This book is a richly illustrated surrogate for actually visiting a monument that, since 1585, has occupied the heart of Vatican City yet has been off-limits for ordinary citizens, then and now. Who knew that the square tower rising at the terminus of the northern flank of the Belvedere Courtyard contained a well-thought-out program of frescoes covering the walls of the seven rooms of this triple-story papal retreat? With this handsome publication, we can take a virtual tour and file through the rooms to admire a sequence of epic narratives and monumental landscapes that celebrate the signal achievement of its… Full Review
April 26, 2005
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Yuko Kikuchi
New York: Routledge, 2004. 328 pp.; 102 b/w ills. Cloth $195.00 (0415297907)
Western readers will have come to know about mingei (folkcraft) theory through The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972), the English potter Bernard Leach’s adaptation of a number of essays by his friend, the philosopher and crafts theorist Yanagi Soetsu, who is the principal subject of Yuko Kikuchi’s book. Or, if such readers happen to be potters themselves, they might have learned the basics of Japanese folkcraft theory from Leach’s own A Potter’s Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). What they will not have discovered is that Yanagi’s work is itself based on a hybridization… Full Review
April 25, 2005
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Michael Leja
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 333 pp.; 24 color ills.; 84 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0520238079)
“Adjusting to modern life in New York circa 1900 meant learning to see skeptically. To function successfully, even to survive, every inhabitant of the modern city, every target of competitive marketing, every participant in the new mass culture, every beneficiary of modern science and technology, every believer in spiritual realms had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile” (1). These bold and intriguing lines open Michael Leja’s recently published book, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Exhaustively researched and brimming with original and brilliant interpretations, Leja’s book proposes a provocative… Full Review
April 21, 2005
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Aloïs Riegl
New York: Zone Books, 2004. 474 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $36.95 (1890951455)
For the best part of the twentieth century, the work of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905) was not accessible to the Anglophone reader. We have particular reason to welcome this highly readable translation of his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts because this particular book was recommended by its original editors, Otto Pächt and Karl Maria Swoboda, as the best introduction to Riegl’s thought. They would have had good cause to know, as they were intimately involved in his first renaissance in Vienna in the 1920s. Earlier translations of Riegl’s writings—Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The Group Portraiture… Full Review
April 19, 2005
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