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Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context includes four essays presented at the conference “The Japanese Buddhist Icon in Its Monastic Context,” held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in March 1994, that represent new trends in scholarship in both Buddhist studies and art history. In his insightful introduction, “Prolegomenon to the Study of Japanese Buddhist Icons,” Robert H. Sharf argues that although extant physical and textual evidence suggests that images played a key role in East Asian Buddhist belief and practice, our understanding of the function of images in the Buddhist context is still unsatisfactory. In his brief historiography… Full Review

Alexander Nemerov states at the outset of The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 that he aims to interpret yet enhance the “strangeness” of Raphaelle’s pictures. He succeeds beautifully. Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825), an American artist who painted ordinary foodstuffs with a descriptive intensity worthy of Gustave Flaubert, continues to fascinate long after the reader has closed this book’s cover. Reading Raphaelle through a trifurcated lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, late Enlightenment social theory, and early American social history, Nemerov explores the “uncanniness” of Raphaelle’s still lifes and argues that their subject was, however improbably, “both the pleasures and… Full Review

The past few years have witnessed the publication of several major studies that reframed the history of early American modernism and the Alfred Stieglitz circle, most notably Celeste Connor’s Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Wanda M. Corn’s The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Sarah Greenough’s Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/Bulfinch Press, 2000). These books share similar themes and concerns: they all investigate the Stieglitz artists after Gallery… Full Review

The Cecil name is firmly tied to the political history of early modern England. As sequential advisers to Elizabeth I and Lord Treasurers under Elizabeth and James I, respectively, William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son, Robert (First Earl Salisbury), have been defined by their governmental policies and decision-making. Seldom have we heard about Cecilian activity that transcended the boundaries of Crown politics. Little has been said of William and Robert’s shared proclivities for building or their mutual passion for gardens, Burghley’s advocacy of economic innovation, or Salisbury’s cultivation of new musical techniques. By focusing strictly on the political lives… Full Review

Martha Sandweiss is not an art historian, and her ambitious new book is not a work of art history. Nonetheless, art historians interested in nineteenth-century photography in the United States should get their hands on a copy, because for them this book is not merely important but indispensable. The historian Sandweiss has written a cultural history of how, between the 1840s and the 1890s, photography and the American West came to be entwined. Her primary concern is with the history of this nexus within public discourse, and consequently she attends mainly to photographic productions of public note,… Full Review

David Ryan opens his introduction to Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters with the inquiry, “How do we connect the contemporary condition of abstract painting with its history?” (Ryan 1). He sees the question as necessarily posing two further ones: What do we mean by abstraction? And how do we construct history? Talking Painting sets out to explore these issues by juxtaposing Ryan’s interviews of twelve abstract painters with each artist’s choice of a critical text about his or her own work. The essays are primarily reprinted from journals and catalogues, and the interviews took place mainly between… Full Review

The fascination of seventeenth-century Dutch painters with the manipulation of pictorial space is a persistent theme in scholarly literature. Whether one reads about representations of Dutch homes, contemplative interiors of whitewashed churches, or courtyards and markets bustling with activity, one of the salient points for discussion is the complex spatial order of these renderings of daily life, whose dizzying sense of accuracy is inevitably a result of contrived artistry. It may therefore appear curious that Martha Hollander’s book, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, constitutes the first sustained analysis of the fundamental role… Full Review

Ann Hamilton, an internationally recognized performance and installation artist, began her artistic training in textiles at the University of Kansas before attending Yale University, where she earned a graduate degree in sculpture. Since earning her M.F.A., Hamilton has taught and produced multimedia art. She is best known for lavish, multiple-room installations in which she disrupts protocols of artistic experience and invites visitors to reexamine their accustomed ways of encountering art. Over the past twenty years, Hamilton has received considerable critical recognition for her distinctive pieces at such locations as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Capp Street Project; Banff… Full Review

Cynthia Hahn’s new study of illustrated saints’ Lives offers its readers a penetrating account of a highly important category of medieval imagery, as well as a thoughtful treatment of topics of interest to scholars working in a wide range of fields within art history. On its most basic level, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century lucidly describes how the concept invoked by its title—the belief that visual images are “portrayed on the heart” as a result of their viewers’ devout attention—underlay the importance assigned to narrative imagery within… Full Review

Keith L. Eggener’s recent book, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is a welcome in-depth study of the urban design, landscape, and architecture of Barragán’s 1,250 acre Gardens of El Pedregal residential subdivision, sited in the El Pedregal lava fields in the southern part of Mexico City. This well-researched book provides much-needed critical commentary on this elusive project, which is now mostly destroyed and is primarily known to us through the evocative photographs of Armando Salas Portugal. Luis Barragán is probably Mexico’s best-known architect and landscape architect of the twentieth… Full Review