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Theoretical literature on Caribbean art is rare, which is why any book that is published on the topic deserves particular attention. In Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Leon Wainwright explores the state of transnational Caribbean art in five chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Arguing for a greater consideration of the Caribbean in the writing of a new transnational art history, he looks at the contributions of Caribbean artists to modern and contemporary art. Key theoretical threads throughout the book revolve around questions of spatiality and temporality—including belatedness, anachronism, and contemporaneity—that have affected the abilities of Caribbean… Full Review

Historical Perspectives on Preventive Conservation is the sixth installment in the Getty Conservation Institute’s “Readings in Conservation” series, which presents compilations of texts that the editors consider to be integral to the development of the theory and practice of the conservation profession. The series began with Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (1996) and this has been followed by (to present) additional titles relating to the conservation of paintings, photographs, textiles, archaeological sites, and paper. Given current interests in preventive conservation and sustainability measures, Historical Perspectives on Preventive Conservation is a timely and important addition to… Full Review

Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America, the title of Wendy Bellion’s impressive book, aptly captures the primary themes of her study of Federal-period American visual culture. Her concern is with demonstrating the agency of looking: how active viewing reflected political ideologies and encouraged the emergence of community and national identities in the decades following the Revolution. Bellion casts “optical pleasure, play, and deceit” as primary characteristics of the period, “in which paintings were experienced as one among many forms of visual deception” and “illusions functioned to exercise and hone skills of looking”… Full Review

In conjunction with the first exhibition project in over twenty years to provide an in-depth examination of the work of painter Horace Pippin, this catalogue’s six contributing essayists focus their texts to contrast with the platitudes that have defined Pippin’s work since the beginning of his public exhibition history in the late 1930s. These standard interpretations stubbornly persisted without critical scrutiny and “with the artist’s complicity” (53), in the words of Anne Monahan, former curator and exhibition coordinator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, originating institution for the earlier (and much referenced) 1994 exhibition I Tell My Heart:… Full Review

Despite the richness of the country’s architectural heritage, museums devoted exclusively to architecture are rare in Italy; equally infrequent are exhibitions dedicated to understanding the building processes and principal protagonists responsible for shaping Italy’s historic landscape. The Palladio Museum in Vicenza is a notable exception. Since its establishment in 2012, the museum has proven itself to be an institution of international importance, promoting the study of Andrea Palladio—one of the most important architects of all time—and staging exhibitions of profound cultural impact. From September 2015 through March 2016, the splendid halls of the piano nobile of the Palazzo… Full Review

In Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828, Paul Niell examines cultural production related to the commemoration of the foundational site of Havana, located on the city’s Plaza de Armas. Legend recounts that the Spanish founded the city there under a ceiba tree. Niell focuses on architecture, urban design, and painting created at three different moments: the 1754–71 construction of a baroque monumental pillar on the Plaza; the 1771–91 classical redesign of the Plaza and creation of two new baroque buildings; and the 1791–1828 fabrication of a… Full Review

The belief that scholarly consensus and the public good, rather than economic competition, should guide the pursuit of knowledge is an ideal inherited from a tradition of disinterested science that took shape in the early modern Republic of Letters and Enlightenment public sphere. Yet was early modern science as disinterested as it is often imagined to be? “No” is Dániel Margócsy’s blunt answer in Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Focusing on the early capitalist economy of the Netherlands, in which scientific pursuits were linked through commercial networks to the rest of Europe… Full Review

The meeting of renowned Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez, the talented painter to King Philip IV, during Rubens’s visit to Spain in 1628–29 has ignited the imagination of art historians. While contemporary sources are frustratingly silent on the encounter, a growing body of scholarship has appraised the impact of the Fleming’s presence on artistic production at the Spanish court, especially on pictures by Velázquez. In Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain, Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver examine both artists’ painted works for the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting lodge situated outside of Madrid… Full Review

Melvin Edwards’s work picks up where the traditional medium of sculpture—until the 1960s, associated with the production of anthropomorphic figures in the round—left off. The beginning of his career coincides almost exactly with Minimalism’s expansive redefinition of sculpture to include any three-dimensional object classifiable as art. While Donald Judd and Robert Morris were exhibiting their first stripped-down, spatially commanding objects in 1963–64, Edwards was learning to weld. Thirty years earlier, the addition of welding to the tools available to a sculptor also expanded the medium, making possible the techniques of construction and assemblage in materials rivaling the permanence of marble… Full Review

“Too many examples, too many quotes, too many theses, and (perhaps the most criminal of all) too many ideas.” So Spyros Papapetros describes the critical responses circa 1893 to the idiosyncratic Aby Warburg’s dissertation in his recent book On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. A certain kind of contemporary reader, especially one habituated to a hairsplitting historicism, might be tempted to raise similar objections to Papapetros’s handsome volume. But that reader, like Warburg’s, would be entirely missing the point. For behind the gossamer of connections that Papapetros delicately weaves around his… Full Review