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

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Sarah Louise Cowan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 280 pp.; 98 color ills.; 12 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780300264296)
In Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, the first monograph devoted to the artist, activist, and MoMA curator, Sarah Louise Cowan focuses on Howardena Pindell’s paintings and collages made between the late 1960s and early 1980s, underscoring her forays into sculpture and video along the way. In doing so, Cowan traces the artist’s ambivalent exploration of modernist form. Teasing out Pindell’s alignment with and strategic revisions of all-over painting, the grid and surface treatments, Cowan ultimately unspools modernist grammar from the narrow, yet nevertheless dominant history of midcentury abstraction developed within mostly white male artistic enclaves. In turn, modernism as a… Full Review
May 17, 2023
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Alessandra Giannotti
Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2021. 116 pp.; 50 color ills. Paper €30.00 (9788822267771)
In 1907, the Chicago heiress Hortense Mitchell Acton and her British husband, Arthur Acton, bought La Pietra, a Renaissance villa in the hills outside Florence, as a home where they might live surrounded by their growing art collection. Among the many treasures they gathered within its walls were eight sixteenth-century terracotta sculptures of religious subjects, examples of a type of decorative object commonly found within Florentine Renaissance homes. The works were made independently of one another by different artists and only assembled as a group by the Actons in the twentieth century. Nearly all stand under two feet high, and… Full Review
May 15, 2023
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Joanne Allen
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 367 pp.; 180 color ills. Cloth $100.00 (9781108985659)
Most people tempted by the title of this book probably know something about choir screens, especially those in Florence. We, as the author acknowledges, all owe a profound debt to Marica Hall’s work on Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, initially presented in Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce (Oxford University Press, 1979). Her explanations for the dismantling of the screens in those two Florentine mendicant churches has shaped our collective understanding of Florentine tramezzi. Joanne Allen’s new book expands exponentially on that topic. She outlines the history, function, and meaning… Full Review
May 8, 2023
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Catherine Hall-van den Elsen
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021. 144 pp.; 83 color ills.; 4 b/w ills. Cloth $40.00 (9781606067321)
This book examines the all too unusual case of the sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), who successfully navigated the challenges of being a woman artist in early modern Spain. The role of women in art throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been under-researched until recently. Spanish art too, has remained less well known or studied in the Anglophone world, compared with Italian art. Sculpture in Spain, which in this period was generally polychromed, has only lately begun to attract the attention it deserves. Catherine Hall’s book provides a welcome new contribution to all these fields. In it, she… Full Review
May 1, 2023
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LaNitra M. Berger
New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. 192 pp.; 46 ills. Hardback $110.00 (9781350187498)
Author’s note: Historical terminologies of racial classification, including “Black” and “Coloured,” which were instantiated by the Population Registration Act of 1950, in South Africa, are used throughout Berger’s book so as not to erase the violence of policies enacted under apartheid. Maid in Uniform, a 1955 portrait of a Black South African domestic worker, is arguably one of the strongest works by painter Irma Stern (1894–1966). Dressed in the uniform typical of her profession, Stern’s defiantly unwilling subject purses her lips and crosses her arms; her eyes demur from the viewer. The maid’s expression signals the complex social relations… Full Review
April 28, 2023
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Jennifer M. Feltman and Sarah Thompson, eds.
London: Routledge, 2019. 344 pp. Cloth $160.00 (9780815396734)
What happens after the initial creative act? In her introduction to The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, Jennifer Feltman calls attention to the fact that art historical writing since Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects has typically prioritized the time of a work’s creation, and instead situates the case studies included in the edited volume in the time between then and now. The book makes the case that works we now label “medieval” are never exclusively so, as they have been transformed in later years, whether materially, semantically, or both. Overall, the collection… Full Review
April 27, 2023
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David Ekserdjian
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 496 pp.; 250 ills. Hardcover $75.00 (9780300253641)
David Ekserdjian describes his new and important book, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative, as a work of “almost demented ambition” (6). The description is apt. A thorough introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, two appendices, and the usual scholarly apparatus adds up to just over 400 pages of tightly-packed, double-columned text. And that text sets out to provide an almost encyclopedic account of the most frequently produced type of art object in Renaissance Italy. Accordingly, the author references “well over a thousand” (61) works of art. These involve the whole of the Italian peninsula, date from circa… Full Review
April 24, 2023
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Adrian Anagnost
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. 248 pp.; 62 color ills.; 52 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300254013)
Rivaled only by Mexico as a center of artistic modernism in the Americas, Brazil, with its wealth of innovative architecture, landscape design, urbanism, painting, sculpture, and performance art, has long attracted the attention of Anglophone scholars and curators. Apart from survey texts, architecture and the other arts have generally been treated separately, in both exhibitions and monographs, which have typically focused on a single person or phenomenon, or positioned Brazilian examples as part of a geographically broader study. Adrian Anagnost, however, brings the country’s arts into dialogue during the pivotal decades from the mid-1920s through the 1960s in Spatial Orders,… Full Review
April 17, 2023
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Adele Nelson
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 382 pp.; 50 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780520379848)
Adele Nelson’s new book is a significant contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Brazilian art and culture. Brazil has been central to art historical research in the last two decades, and numerous scholars, both international and Brazilian, have turned their attention to the art produced in the immediate postwar period, a moment when the foundation of the São Paulo Bienal and a surge of museum building transformed the artistic landscape in the country. Nelson’s study is groundbreaking in several ways: it challenges the dominant narrative that the emergence and evolution of abstraction in Brazil was tied primarily to a quest… Full Review
April 14, 2023
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Dario Donetti and Cara Rachele, eds.
Brepols, 2021. 176 pp.; 60 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Hardback € 85.00 (9782503591186)
Although architectural drawings were made before the Renaissance, the increasing availability of paper in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe had a profound influence on the tools and processes of architectural design. Paper was economical, flexible, portable, and an efficient medium for capturing ideas quickly and for conveying elaborate and complex ideas about masses and volumes in visual terms. But architects did not abandon centuries-old tools overnight, and throughout the Renaissance, drawings continued to be made with a variety of media and for diverse purposes. Generations of modern historians, however, have given primacy to drawings on paper and have studied… Full Review
March 27, 2023
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