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

Browse Recent Book Reviews

Veerle Poupeye
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 204 pp.; 76 color ills.; 101 b/w ills. Paper $14.95 (0500203067)
Those familiar with Thames & Hudson's World of Art series can predict the tone and format of this volume, which is a pioneering effort worthy of considerable attention and praise. It is certainly no easy task to codify and condense a region as complex and scattered as the Caribbean. The author, Veerle Poupeye (according to the Thames & Hudson publicity blurb) is a Jamaican-based art historian, critic, and curator, trained in Belgium. I wish I knew how much fieldwork and archival work the author accomplished, doing actual interviews rather than relying on the cited sources. This might help explain the… Full Review
May 10, 1999
Thumbnail
Richard Lehan
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 307 pp. Paper $45.00 (0520212568)
Over the course of the modern era, literary representations of the city stretch far beyond the physical and social fabric of cities. Poetry and prose build on the architectural and commerical contours of urbanity, at times outfitting streets in tuxedos, at other times paring them into rotten furrows. Take the case of London, the city in the world possessed of perhaps the most extensive literary representations. William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot both wrote powerful and disturbing descriptions that reconfigure the vast changes taking place in London during its long engagement with modernity and the Industrial Revolution. In Wordsworth's The… Full Review
May 10, 1999
Thumbnail
J. F. Heijbroek and Margaret F. MacDonald
Zwolle, Netherlands: University of Washington Press and Waanders, 1998. 144 pp.; 29 color ills.; 157 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9040091838)
On September 3, 1889, James McNeill Whistler wrote a letter from Amsterdam to the Fine Arts Society in London describing, with an undercurrent of Whistlerian sarcasm, his most recent artistic activity: "I find myself doing far finer work than any I have hitherto produced—and the subjects appeal to me most sympathetically—which is all important. . . . I have begun etchings here—that already give me great satisfaction—I shall therefore go on, and I will produce new plates—of various sizes—The beauty and importance of these plates you can only estimate from your knowledge of my care for my own reputation… Full Review
May 10, 1999
Richard Townsend, ed.
New York: Thames and Hudson in association with Art Institute of Chicago, 1998. 446 pp.; 258 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0500050929)
The lively ceramic traditions of ancient West Mexico are well-known: bold, painted warriors, women, and animals, including the famous Colima dogs; small painted house models and village scenes in which humans feast, play ball, and dance. Much of this work was created in the era between 200 B.C. and 300 A.D., the Late Formative phase of Mesoamerican cultural history. Although visually familiar, this work has never been well understood. It has seldom been studied on its own terms, but seen merely as a pale country cousin to the larger-scale visual traditions of the Maya, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican "high cultures."… Full Review
May 10, 1999
Thumbnail
Mary Warner Blanchard
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 320 pp.; 221 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0300074603)
In this study, Mary Warner Blanchard re-reads the American aesthetic movement as a broad-based, popular enterprise that produced a vibrant, female, public culture through the medium of the decorative arts. Her goal is to rescue important "female visionaries" of the movement from the oblivion that befell them through most of the twentieth century. (pp. xiv-xv) Blanchard selects four fascinating and underrated figures for reevaluation: textile designer Candace Thurber Wheeler, poet Celia Thaxter, potter Mary Louise McLaughlin, and art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer. Each of these women richly deserves study, and Blanchard has made a substantial contribution in giving them… Full Review
May 7, 1999
Thumbnail
Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, eds.
New York: Phaidon, 1998. 304 pp.; many color ills.; many b/w ills. Cloth $59.95 (0714835145)
Among European publishers of books on environmental art, largely American, there seems to be a consensus that the representation of projects encompassing such extensive terrain demands oversize display. The sizes of printed pages, illustrations, and often fonts, are jumbo, sheets are thick, pages in great number, overall, the tomes hefty. Thus Gilles Tiberghien's Land Art, published by Editions Carres, Paris, in 1993, and in an English translation by Princeton Architectural Press in 1995, measured 12 by 10.5 inches and weighed five pounds. Now weighing in at four pounds (back pages are in lighter, uncoated stock), identical height and just a… Full Review
May 7, 1999
Thumbnail
Paul Hayes Tucker, ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 192 pp. Paper $49.95 (0521479843)
For all the directness of its facture, and despite the candor of model Victorine Meurent's knowing (yet somehow alienated) gaze, Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a manifesto of modern painting, has always proved problematic when it comes to critical and historical interpretation. At the time of its succes de scandale at the Salon des refusés in 1863, one critic admitted that he searched "in vain for the meaning" of it. Since that time, various readings have been suggested, none of them definitive. Zola's formalism in retrospect appears to have been at least partly an effort to defuse the scandal, yet… Full Review
May 6, 1999
Thumbnail
Michael Kelly, ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2224 pp.; 90 b/w ills. Cloth $495.00 (0195113071)
The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics will be a useful resource to students, practitioners, and historians of the arts, as well as to aestheticians and other philosophers. But this may not be evident from its title. For those who define terms narrowly, this publication tests the boundaries of "aesthetics" and "encyclopedia." However, those who are simply wary of reading about aesthetics or of consulting encyclopedias will be pleasantly surprised. Aesthetics, here, is interpreted broadly, and the approach to being encyclopedic is to take a panoramic snapshot of current activity in a large discourse community. Editor Michael Kelly acknowledges… Full Review
May 3, 1999
Thumbnail
Philip W. Jackson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 222 pp. Cloth $48.00 (9780300072136)
Pragmatism maintained that a proposition must be tested, rendered active, before it can be deemed valid. The criteria of judgment that William James set out is simply "what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be true." It is therefore appropriate that the first American school of theory should be used to test the operations of contemporary American art. William James's criteria is extended by the philosopher John Dewey, who asks that a proposition not only be tested to make a difference, but that… Full Review
April 30, 1999
Thumbnail
Cecil L. Striker and Y. Dogan Kuban, eds.
Munich: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1997. 150 pp.; 35 color ills.; 144 b/w ills. Cloth $69.95 (3805320264)
When the International Congress of Byzantine Studies convened in Istanbul in 1955, none of its delegates was able to enter the Byzantine church now known as the Kalenderhane Camii, even though it lay barely five minutes from Istanbul University. Locked and abandoned, the building was not penetrated until a decade later, when Striker received permission to cut the lock, the key having long since disappeared. The state of decrepitude he found could not disguise the Kalenderhane's historical significance. Happily, dereliction made it possible for Striker, in collaboration with Kuban, to undertake the detailed analysis, excavation, and restoration of the building… Full Review
April 30, 1999