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Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic are timely additions to a flourishing discourse on the instruments of modernity within the larger history of Ottoman visual culture. In a tightly edited and richly illustrated volume of sixteen essays, Scramble for the Past situates the practice of archaeology in the empire as a continual tug-of-war played out in global and local arenas of politics, science, and culture. The essays destabilize prevailing hegemonic narratives to make space for and locate Ottoman… Full Review

The Hakuhō period (ca. 650–ca. 710) has tended to be treated as a time of transition overshadowed by its preceding Asuka and succeeding Nara periods; indeed, its time span and even existence independent of the Asuka and Nara are controversial. Nevertheless, the corpus of small gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture, a genre of art pieces characteristic of this era, shows an extremely rich variety in style. Donald F. McCallum’s Hakuhō Sculpture is the first book-length publication exclusively devoted to gilt-bronze Buddhist sculpture from the Hakuhō period. McCallum examines the stylistic evolution of Hakuhō sculpture and reassesses its artistic achievement; he argues that… Full Review

Emanuel Mayer’s ambitious The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE–250 CE is divided into two distinct methodological parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is a synthesis of significant trends in the economic history of the Roman imperial period that emphasizes the abundant presence of a prosperous mercantile class across the Roman Empire. Adopting Max Weber’s definition of the middle class as a well-defined group that “shared cultural traits as well as economic opportunities” (18), Mayer proceeds to collect a wealth of archaeological evidence to demonstrate that ancient cities were dominated by production-oriented commercial classes… Full Review

As one might expect, the retrospective exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s work at the National Gallery of Art is, quite literally, explosive. In spite of their familiarity, the bursts of color and graphism still manage to excite. The surprise of Lichtenstein’s technique and source material may have worn over time, but his oeuvre, laid out across fourteen rooms spanning three decades, offers new moments of revelation. Alongside the well-known cartoon melodramas of love and war are early abstractions in an imitative expressionist style; late, expansive canvases inspired by Chinese landscape painting; peculiar forays into a mock-Art Deco manner; and a vast… Full Review

There is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic. (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-third Letter) In 2002, Jacques Rancière published an essay in the New Left Review discussing Schiller’s famous fifteenth letter from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 [March/April 2002]: 133–51). Written in 1795, just after the French Revolution had turned to Terror, Schiller tried to resolve the discrepancy between nature and cultural refinement, positing that the human need to play can bridge… Full Review

The Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1576–77), is unrivaled in its centrality to an understanding of the contact period of central Mexico. Although it has been amply appreciated and studied since the late nineteenth century, its ongoing ethnographic, linguistic, and historical utility cannot be overstated. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún spearheaded the encyclopedic colonial project in collaboration with a team of indigenous scribes and painters. His final edition has a richly laden content recorded in three modes: Spanish, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and an extraordinary array of images that constitute a… Full Review

Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico at the Getty Research Institute aptly starts with an enlarged photograph of Wolfgan Paalen holding a recently painted portrait of André Breton. Standing in front of, but not at all blocking Breton’s enormous painted visage, Paalen stares expressionless at the camera. As the photograph intimates, Breton loomed large over Paalen’s artistic practice and his new community in Mexico, which he named the Dyn group, meaning Greek for “the possible.” Even though Paalen announced his farewell to Surrealism and to the tight strictures of Bretonian Surrealism in particular, it seems that he could… Full Review

A woodcut illustration of the known world spreads across two pages of the Liber Chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493. The edges of the map are held in place by Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the three sons of Noah who divided Asia, Africa, and Europe between them and repopulated the human race after the biblical Flood. In this representation, published four years before Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the African continent, the true geographical shape of Africa remains undefined. On the page to the left are images of monstrous races that, according to both classical and Christian traditions… Full Review

At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of… Full Review

Just before Christmas 1881, Vincent van Gogh took some of his studies to The Hague to show Anton Mauve, then a well-known painter (and his cousin by marriage). It was his first professional art criticism. As he later wrote to his brother, Theo, “When Mauve saw my studies, he said at once, ‘You are sitting too close to your model.’” No reference to this episode is made in the catalogue or labels for Van Gogh Up Close, but it seems to me quite revealing and pertinent to the theme of the exhibition. Less than a year into his… Full Review