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Formal analysis and interpretation of artworks often consider art funding trivial compared to historical and social background, especially in societies where art funding is sparse. Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey focuses on this subordinate, if not often-overlooked aspect of art creation and cultural production. Proposing economy as a crucial metric to production, Smith analyzes the art scene in 1950s Turkey by focusing on two galleries and several influential artists of the time, while giving an overview of social, political, and economic exchange between the United States and Turkey. In doing so, Smith exemplifies recent… Full Review

Scholarship about art and culture in the 1980s Central European socialist bloc often evinces a certain impatience motivated by hindsight. Simply put, we know what is coming to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in 1989. As a result, inquiry is approached through the lens of the imminent political change and sets as its task the diagnosis of the terminal symptoms preceding these events. In Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany, Sara Blaylock, associate professor of art history at University of Minnesota Duluth, invites us to slow down and approach this era outside this teleological frame. By engaging… Full Review

Although fin-de-siècle Vienna is often thought of as having been strictly Austrian, it is worth remembering that Vienna was one of two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Divided between the dual monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the empire’s borders extended from parts of modern-day Italy and Croatia to Romania and Ukraine. Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles and the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design, the small yet impactful exhibition curated by Genevieve Cortinovis at the St. Louis Art Museum, provides a hearty challenge to Austrian-centric historiography. Rather than refute Vienna’s importance, the exhibition situates it… Full Review

Few artists have been as profoundly involved in their political milieu as Jacques Louis David. In this regard, the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the artist’s drawings—“Radical Draftsman”—makes perfect sense. Indeed, its signature image, The Oath of the Tennis Court, shows David at the zenith of his artistic service to the nascent republic: members of the Third Estate unite in the highly finished study, which he displayed at the Salon of 1791 to inspire citizens to fund an ambitious painting, one he ultimately never completed. Less triumphant proof of the artist’s embroilment in the French… Full Review

In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review

Ikat is one of the most ancient and important traditional textile dyeing techniques connecting East and West, and in recent years has been growing in recognition. Ikat has a distinctive look with shaggy edges and shifted skinny lines. Commercially printed ikat-inspired designs are sold for such items as curtains and cushion covers as people enjoy the aesthetic of ikat in their living rooms. However, many people may not know about real ikat weaving processes. Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, beautifully conceived and installed by curator of African and Oceanic art Pamela McCluskey, provides an important sense of the… Full Review

Painted Cloth offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of… Full Review

Michaelina Wautier and ‘The Five Senses’: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the Brussels-based female painter who, despite her unmistakable artistic talent and successful career, fell into obscurity after her death. Only recently have experts rediscovered and revalued the oeuvre of Michaelina Wautier (1604­–1684), mainly thanks to the scholarship of Katlijne van der Stichelen, professor in art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A pioneer in the study of female artists, Van der Stichelen began researching Wautier after she… Full Review

In 1783, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner posed a question to the Berlinische Monatsschrift’s readers: “What is the Enlightenment?” One year later, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, responded with an aphorism: “Sapere aude!” or “Dare to Know!” Kant went on to define the Enlightenment as the “resolution and courage” to use one’s own reason to comprehend the world, unrestricted by prejudice and the guidance of others. Two hundred years after Kant’s response, Michel Foucault called attention to the temporal structure of this question. Zöllner and Kant, Foucault argued, described the Enlightenment in the present tense… Full Review

When Eike Schmidt left the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) in 2015 to become director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, he did not forget his old institution. The connection paid off for the former’s audiences this fall and winter as forty-six treasures from the Uffizi came to Minneapolis. There, joining with a dozen objects from MIA’s own collection (and one from a Chicago private collection), they represented the flowering of the Renaissance in the quattrocento. The exhibition scored high marks for showmanship, with spaces and ideas unfolding in a thrilling, almost cinematic sequence. Though… Full Review