Browse Recent Book Reviews

Lisa Farrington’s African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History is invaluable for those teaching surveys of African American art as well as any reader interested in the subject. Staple publications in this area include Sharon Patton’s African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Richard J. Powell’s Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997; reproduced in its second edition as Black Art: A Cultural History [New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002]), rich sources now fifteen to twenty years old and in need of augmentation, particularly in light of the amazing spectrum of… Full Review

In last year’s exhibition of Chilean art at the Carpenter Center for Visual Art at Harvard University, absence signaled the latency of bodies that feel pain, that suffer longing, or, in a powerful twist, that even travel from 1970s Santiago to present-day Boston. In the works on view in Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now, artists used the tactics of conceptual art to respond to the traumas inflicted on citizens after the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet established in 1974. Contemporary bodies were also present: three… Full Review

Can there be a more enigmatic corpus in art writing than that of the German critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940)? In Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art, Sebastian Zeidler presents not only a detailed, rigorous analysis of Einstein’s fragmentary, gnomic writings, but a provocative extrapolation of their potentials. Einstein—the book’s acknowledged “hero”—imparted to his criticism an idiosyncratic, urgent density, by turns profound and obscure, informed by a heterogeneous array of readings in art history, ethnology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His was a discourse animated by “complicated complexity” (122), to quote one of the many unpublished manuscripts… Full Review

“What Art Unveils” is the title of an essay by cognitive scientist and philosopher Alva Noë printed in the opinion pages of the New York Times on October 5, 2015, the year his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature was published. The op-ed states some of the book’s basic arguments: art, for Noë, is a human “making activity,” but a special activity, a “research practice” that “unveils us to ourselves.” Art begins (and design stops) “when we are unable to take the background of our familiar technologies and activities for granted, and when we can no longer take for… Full Review

I do not usually care much about the clothes that artists wear or what their living rooms look like. But after reading Wanda Corn’s new book about Georgia O’Keeffe, I will certainly pay more attention. Previous O’Keeffe scholars have delved deeply into the artist’s personal and professional relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, speculated on her sexuality as expressed in her flower imagery, and dissected her skull paintings. None, however, have so fully detailed the contents of her closet. Written in conjunction with an innovative exhibition of both her art and her clothes, Corn’s book provides an in-depth study of the importance… Full Review

The Pizzuti Collection’s Visions from India comprises two exhibitions: Transforming Vision: 21st Century Art from the Pizzuti Collection, the larger in scope and size, showcases significant holdings of very recent Indian art; The Progressive Master: Francis Newton Souza from the Rajadhyaksha Collection, includes thirty works by the sought-after Indian modernist painter. These exhibitions, tucked away in a private nonprofit museum in Columbus, Ohio, present some excellent examples of Indian modern and contemporary art, while also making visible how private collecting of Indian art has been facilitated in the United States in recent decades. In the short catalogue… Full Review

Fugitive Objects features impressive scholarship, skillfully engaging a great variety of sources: philosophical texts, literary works, sculptures, and paintings, as well as objects, texts, and images from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture. But at the same time, unlike many other scholarly works, it also tells an exciting story, full of suspense, which at times makes the book a genuine page-turner. In Hegelian terms, this story could be summarized by another title, “The Story of Sculpture after the End of Sculpture.” It is fitting to refer to Hegel here, because Catriona MacLeod herself, in the first chapter, draws on both Hegel’s… Full Review

As befits a study of the appearance of documents, Jessica Berenbeim’s Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England is beautifully designed and richly illustrated. It also makes an important contribution to the study of medieval manuscripts, breaking out of traditional disciplinary categorizations to offer new insights that will be of relevance to both art historians and historians. Indeed, the form and function of medieval documents has become an interdisciplinary blind spot. Art historians are often tempted to focus on illumination, at the expense of questions about the overall design of charters or books, and sometimes ignore the… Full Review

When one thinks of architecture in the contemporary Middle East, a mosque is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Today, critics and journalists are more focused on the starchitect museums of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island or the record-setting towers of Dubai and Kuala Lumpur than on places of communal worship. In her volume The Transnational Mosque, however, Kishwar Rizvi counters this perception and contends that mosque architecture is equally a space where the sociopolitical dynamics of the region can be observed and evaluated, especially considering religion’s comeback in social discourse around the world over the past… Full Review

Few college instructors or students of art history today are likely to be unfamiliar with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expansive Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. With over one thousand thematic essays written by experts in the field, as well as more than 7,600 pages featuring artworks from the Met’s collection, the timeline is a formidable and immensely popular online resource.[i] Parallel to its larger rebranding efforts in 2016, the Met launched its new edition of the timeline, featuring a brand-new, ultra-clean interface designed by the New York–based firm CHIPS. The timeline now offers a user experience… Full Review