Browse Recent Book Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1891, Wilhelm Vöge inaugurated the modern academic study of Ottonian book illumination with the publication of his dissertation, Eine deutsche Malerschule um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends (Trier, 1891). Vöge's still classic monograph assembled a cohesive corpus of selected Ottonian manuscripts based on an investigation that included stylistic, iconographic, and textual criticism; his Malerschule has since been attributed to the monastic scriptorium of Reichenau. Despite the occasional attack, the Reichenau school has remained the bedrock of Ottonian manuscript studies; dated to ca. 1000, such magnificent books as the Otto Gospels, the Bamberg Apocalypse, and the Pericopes of Henry… Full Review

The brevity and informal nature of these essays, first published in German in 1992, should not obscure their density, just as the length and extremely formal nature of Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art should not obscure the clarity of its essential argument. That dichotomy—dense, "formless" evocation versus brief, "rational" argument—will be familiar to Belting, since it is one of the manifestations of the "troublesome" relationship between German and Italian art. The question of the national characteristics of art is important but treacherous, perhaps especially in Germany's case.… Full Review

This splendidly illustrated book provides a meticulous documentation of the restoration of one of the finest works of medieval Islamic woodwork surviving today. Restoration began as a result of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1992 exhibition "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain" in which the minbar (pulpit) of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh was featured in the catalogue but, due to its fragile condition, could not suffer transport for display in New York and Granada. In 1996–97 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs, assembled a technical team to clean, stabilize, and support… Full Review