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Madame Cézanne was an unprecedented, likely once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that spotlighted Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show sought to revise misconceptions, especially about the artist’s affection, or lack thereof, for his wife, and reinvigorate general and scholarly interest in this group of work. To that end, it presented twenty-four of the twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense and contextualized them with less formal graphite sketches, watercolors, and one of her few extant letters. In addition, an… Full Review

The British interest in Claude Lorrain began during the artist’s lifetime. In 1644, an unidentified Englishman commissioned two of Claude’s landscapes: Landscape with Narcissus and Echo and A Temple of Bacchus (Humphrey Wine, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, London: National Gallery, 2001, 88). By the beginning of the nineteenth century Claude had assumed an unassailable position, described by John Constable as “the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw” (R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Discourses, Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970, 52). The influence of Claude on British art has perhaps not surprisingly generated… Full Review

In 1970, Nicholas Negroponte dedicated his book about computer- and robot-aided design “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture” (The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973, front matter). The book, a seminal collection of experiments and observations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is a primary document in the history of the digitalization of architecture from a moment when clear distinctions between hardware and software had yet to be established. The role of “machines” (including computer programs, projective screens, and mechanical arms) in architectural culture was urgently felt… Full Review

The latest book by Hendrik W. Dey examines the afterlife of the Roman city in the territories of the erstwhile Roman Empire until roughly the ninth century. As a scholar with multiple threads of training in classics, Dey writes his book with a strong archaeological research method that emphasizes the perseverance of urban paradigms of the Greco-Roman world beyond literary tropes or oversimplified economical and demographical analyses. The Afterlife of the Roman City looks in particular at monumental architecture and urban topography by highlighting their importance in the definition of the urban space as a place of ceremonial manifestations of… Full Review

Because the few grand tapestries of the early modern period that survive are frail and rarely exhibited, we forget that they were the most luxurious and prized of art forms among European elite, far costlier than painting or sculpture. So it is rare to encounter not one but four monumental Flemish tapestries in the remarkable exhibition Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The four belong to a series of twenty tapestries, known as The Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Habsburg princess and Spanish… Full Review

Jennifer L. Shaw’s Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals joins a group of recent publications on the female Surrealist artist Claude Cahun. However, this study is the first in-depth look at Cahun’s signature book, Aveux non avenus, written in the 1920s and published in 1930 in Paris. It appeared in English in 2008 as Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions, although the English title misses the double subtleties and punning play of “confessions” and “unconfessed” (trans. Susan de Muth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Shaw calls the book “Cahun’s manifesto” and argues convincingly that the artist saw it as an activist text… Full Review

Since the publication of his 1989 text Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press), Donald Preziosi has continued an internal interrogation of our discipline. After the recent appearance of a study jointly written with Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; see my review in the Journal of Art Historiography 9 [December 2013]: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/verstegen-rev.pdf), we now have another complete statement of Preziosi’s views: Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity. In this book, he repeatedly thinks about the contemporary state of globalization and the way… Full Review

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue of Andrew Wyeth paintings illustrating views looking out of and through windows are the most recent examples of a sea change in scholarship on the artist. In 1977, Robert Rosenblum called Wyeth at once the most overrated and underrated artist of the twentieth century (cited in Henry Adams, “Wyeth’s World,” Smithsonian Magazine [June 2006]: 84–92). Wanda Corn has labeled the critical and academic hostility to Wyeth’s work throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century “the Wyeth curse.” In 2005, Anne Classen Knutson organized a session called “Rethinking Andrew Wyeth” at the College… Full Review

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and presented by Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art opened at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in a festival-like manner and included two densely installed museum galleries and a plethora of performances presented in the sculpture garden. At the Walker, Radical Presence featured thirty-six artists—one less than the original showing in Houston due to conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s public and controversial self-removal from the exhibition. Predominantly hashed out during the New York leg of the exhibition’s tour, not much beyond posting the ARTnews article on the subject was made of the… Full Review

Jacques-Louis David casts a long shadow over portraiture during the period of the French Revolution, with the stern visages and intense gestures of members of the Third Estate in The Tennis Court Oath (1792); his iconic portrayal of Jean-Paul Marat lifeless in his bath (1793); his sensitive depiction of the Dutch republican Jacobus Blauw deep in thought at his desk (1795); and eventually his grandiloquent homages to Napoleon, including his portrayal of the Emperor’s coronation (1807). It is to Amy Freund’s immense credit that while she does not lose sight of David’s contributions to the genre, she gives the canonic… Full Review