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“See the largest selection of Rembrandt paintings assembled in the United States. . . . Ever.” Such ads helped make Rembrandt in America one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In its last days, demand was so high that an aggressive scalper tried to sell his extra ticket to a senior administrator as she returned from lunch. The show’s success was all the more remarkable given its genesis: curatorial conversations about the links between collecting and connoisseurship. With those links as its defining concept, Rembrandt in America, curated by George S… Full Review

The eerie title of Rachel Poliquin’s beautifully illustrated and designed book, The Breathless Zoo, first in the exciting new “Animalibus” series edited by Nigel Rothfels and Gary Marvin, immediately calls attention to the contradictions at the heart of its subject. Taxidermy, which can be traced at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a process whereby animals are killed in order to be preserved and displayed, and in which their deaths—deliberate and celebrated in some instances, accidental or mourned in others—linger in the background of that display. The result is an irresolvable tension between the live animal taxidermy… Full Review

Once in a while an exhibition comes along that achieves many things. It illuminates past and present, and does so by creating a viewing experience both beautiful and instructive. All the better when such an exhibition also brightens up a blind spot in the history of art. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens achieved this. Curated by Wolfram Koeppe, Maria Kellen French Curator of European Decorative Arts, the show was a monographic investigation of father-and-son furniture makers Abraham (1711–1793) and David Roentgen (1743–1807), whose workshop in the German town… Full Review

In their introduction to The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir make a refreshingly straightforward proposition about the historical relationship between the photograph and the printed page: “Ever since the publication of Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–46) . . . the home of the photograph has been the book as much as the gallery wall. It could even be argued that the book is the first and proper home of the photographic image from which it moved out to take up residence in the fine art gallery and the modern… Full Review

The market that readers of The Rise of the Art Market in London, 1850–1939 encounter is not one driven by an invisible hand. In lieu of focusing on quantitative analyses of the “fiscal exchange value of the work of art” (15), the volume’s editors and contributors trace the tacit, coordinated, and often failed activities of myriad actors—dealers, auctioneers, collectors, painters, museum trustees, the art presses—that underpinned the development of London’s art market within a legible geographical terrain from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar years. The collection thus privileges the theoretical parameters of “cultural geography” and the methods of art… Full Review

"What is alive anyhow?" This is one of the simple, troubling, and eternal questions posed by Casey Gardner's artists' book, Body of Inquiry. Her response is anything but simple. Partly inspired by the Musée des arts et meétiers, a labyrinth of scientific instruments and investigations in Paris, Gardner creates a complex multi-layered work combining the museum, her elementary science classes, technical facts, and an anatomical model called Torso Woman with her speculations on life, science, and death. The result is truly surprising. In the colophon Gardner states that "this book has been on my mind for quite some… Full Review

Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of these exhibitions brought Turner’s works before U.S. audiences and provided a fresh evaluation of his career; the latter two focused on the artist’s intense engagement… Full Review

The development of photography over the course of the nineteenth century was a development of vision. For the first time, a person, via a mechanical device, could transcribe reality, freeze it, as it were, into an external, two-dimensional image. Thus, rather than providing an objective recording of reality, photography presented viewers with a new way of seeing reality. The manner in which artists utilized this new vision is the subject of Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, an exhibition curated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Edwin Becker, Eliza Rathbone, and Ellen W. Lee. It features an impressive array of… Full Review

Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (1735). Taking Time celebrates the arrival of Chardin’s painting to Waddesdon Manor, where it joins another famous genre painting by Chardin, Girl with a Shuttlecock (1737)… Full Review

It used to be simpler. When Beaumont Newhall published his first English-language surveys of the history of photography in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the art-historical establishment did not consider photography a legitimate art, and when a modernist did think about the relation of the camera to art, it was often under a cloud of worry that some established painter would be revealed to have used a photograph as his source. Newhall thus began his project from a position of deficit: photography, as he understood it, could be expressive but was fundamentally different from painting and the graphic arts… Full Review