Browse Recent Book Reviews

Meredith Gill’s Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy sets ambitious goals. She states that “in studying angels we are . . . always studying the big questions, whether these may be about the nature of existence; about humankind’s relation to the supernal; about the identity of language, or the definitions of ‘place,’ ‘hierarchy,’ ‘metaphor,’ or ‘love.’ Studying angels . . . makes available to us the imaginations of artists as they grapple with the marvelous problem of representing the invisible” (14). As Gill explains in her introduction, in their theological essence angels were incorporeal and… Full Review

Basquiat and the Bayou is a catalogue accompanying the exhibition of ten works by Jean-Michel Basquiat held at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Its contributors attempt to expand an understanding of Basquiat’s art by locating it within an African diasporic identity via interpretations of a selection of his Southern-themed works. Curator Franklin Sirmans’s essay, also titled “Basquiat and the Bayou,” is essentially an exhibition review. It describes works that reference the Mississippi River, religion, jazz, and zydeco, implying a thematic relationship among them that he does not fully detail. Sirmans visualizes Basquiat “meditating on the… Full Review

The ten essays in this edited collection focus on the role of photography in the implementation of colonial policy in early twentieth-century Indonesia and the responses of the local Indies people whose lives were affected and shaped by this policy. Susie Protschky, the book’s editor, explains that in the very early years of the twentieth century, local resistance to Dutch rule had become so resounding that the government was forced to moderate its policies. The new suite of liberal developmentalist reforms introduced in 1904 was known collectively as the “Ethical Policy.” Photography is the frame through which this policy is… Full Review

Embodiments: Masterworks of African Figurative Sculpture is an ambitious exhibition project accompanied by an equally substantial catalogue. Highlighting 120 selections that constitute almost half of the private collection of Dr. Richard H. Scheller, the exhibition is composed of an eloquent mixture of “classical” or “canonical” works, to use the catalogue’s terminology, punctuated with a jaw-dropping array of rare and unusual sculptural forms that “challenge commonly held assumptions about African art,” to quote the exhibition’s online description, and underscore the sheer diversity of sculptural traditions that exist across the broad swathe of West and Central Africa. Yet the objects in this… Full Review

Jesse M. Locker’s Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting examines the Baroque artist’s career as an independent professional, beginning in the 1620s, within the context of the courtly and literary cultures of Venice, Naples, and Florence. Locker’s study thoughtfully builds on, and at times challenges, the work of scholars and authors who have made Artemisia an (almost) household name, including R. Ward Bissell, Keith Christiansen, Roberto Contini, Mary Garrard, Alexandra Lapierre, and Judith W. Mann. At the outset, Locker quotes Riccardo Lattuada’s observation that “a single document or an individual painting can alter substantially our understanding of [Artemisia’s] work and… Full Review

What is the place of politicized violence within democratic society, and what role do fine artists play in this debate? Ross Barrett takes up these questions in Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art, a thematic study that probes how American painters working between 1820 and 1890 navigated “the ideological difficulties and symbolic possibilities” (3) of the subject of insurrection. Barrett’s case-study approach focuses five trim chapters on seven easel paintings inspired by specific incidents of contemporary political unrest. Employing a diverse range of evidence including artist biography, historical context, popular visual culture, formal analysis, and… Full Review

Michalis Pichler’s The Ego and Its Own takes ownership of Max Stirner’s philosophical incantation of the same name originally published in 1844. Appearing four years before the Communist Manifesto, Stirner’s text aimed at “not an overthrow of an established order but . . . elevation above it” (Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907). Both books are split into two parts: part 1, entitled “Man,” considers the ways in which an individual defines her or his substance, be it citizenship (“Political Liberalism”), labor (“Social Liberalism”), or critical activity (“Humane Liberalism”); part 2… Full Review

In 2016, the much-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is slated to open on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The museum’s mission, as stated on its website, “to help all Americans see just how central African American history is for all,” links the act of viewing to the acts of remembrance and understanding the museum promotes. Fittingly, Mabel O. Wilson devotes the prologue and epilogue of her study of twentieth-century black-organized public history exhibitions and museums, Negro Buildings: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, with the circumstances surrounding the NMAAHC… Full Review

In the last decade, the study of eighteenth-century Qing court art has become its own subfield of late imperial Chinese art, with specific objectives pursued from a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective. In the wake of the revisionist “New Qing History” that has sought to displace the Sinocentrism of earlier historical narratives, the art commissioned by the last dynasty’s non-Han ruling elite has come to appear more complex than what the labels “hybrid” or “exotic” might convey. (On the objectives of the New Qing History, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 [Winter 2004]: 193–206.) Tibetan, Mongolian, Inner… Full Review

As part of the celebrations attending its eightieth anniversary, the Musée Marmottan Monet organized an exhibition of its namesake’s famous work Impression, soleil levant (Impression: Sunrise, 1872). The painting has long been considered the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection, and the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue offer an opportunity to present new research on this well-studied picture. Readers familiar with the extensive literature may wonder whether there remains anything left to be said about this painting. In other words, what light can this new research shed on Monet’s Sunrise? What significance does the painting… Full Review