Browse Recent Reviews

Over the last decade there has been a quiet but persistent revolution in scholarship on photography. The growing popularity of the medium as a focus of academic study, coupled with the desire by some researchers to explore histories of photography beyond the mainstream, has seen a groundswell of work being undertaken in regions outside of the United States and Europe. Pushing beyond the limited and generally imperialistic boundaries still apparent in most world histories of photography, Australasian photo-historians are actively contributing to a more global understanding of the medium. This is most evident in Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf’s notable… Full Review

The thirty-seven alabaster figures—most of them roughly sixteen inches tall—that visited the superbly expanded and renovated Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this spring have now completed their second of three years on the road. Having never before been seen as a complete grouping outside of France, in early 2010 the sculptures left Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts for a seven-stop American tour that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concluded in Richmond. From there they have proceeded to Bruges and now Berlin, two cities added after their voyage began. Organized by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME) and… Full Review

South Los Angeles. August 1972. A crowd of 100,000 spectators fills the Los Angeles Coliseum to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts uprisings. Jesse Jackson delivers a rousing invocation, inciting the crowd to raise their fists in solidarity. The occasion: Wattstax Music Festival, the black analogue to Woodstock. Footage from this event went largely unnoticed until the 2004 re-release of Wattstax, Mel Stuart’s 1973 documentary of the landmark concert. A mash-up of interviews and live concert footage, Wattstax highlights the urgent political climate of the 1960s and 1970s that fostered emerging discourses around identity, resistance, visibility, and… Full Review

Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism. Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues,… Full Review

In 2009, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, acquired an important tea storage jar at auction. The deep brown stoneware jar has an asymmetric glaze and stands 41.6 centimeters tall. Named “Chigusa,” the jar is believed to have been made in China during the thirteenth or fourteenth century before it was imported to Japan, where it became a prized object for practitioners of the Japanese tea culture (chanoyu). At purchase, the jar was accompanied by extensive documentary material, including inscribed storage boxes and letters. To celebrate the acquisition of this object, the museum organized an online… Full Review

Plagued by migraines and seemingly allergic to the sun-dappled environs in which she spent so many of her years, Joan Didion nonetheless wrote into being a host of characters that participated in a dissolute Golden State fantasy. Her stories from the 1960s evoke the siren cupidity of a nostalgic, decidedly prelapsarian California, even as they admit an illusion fraying at the seams. That her essays from the other side of the long decade comprise such topics as Malibu fires, Jerry Brown, and Sharon Tate might not surprise. Still, her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From (New York: Vintage), tenders a… Full Review

At the outset, the recent exhibition Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna was presented as both a close look at sixteenth-century Venetian painting and as a chapter in the history of collecting. The collection of Europe’s dominant imperial family, the Habsburgs, is now housed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; because that museum’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is undergoing renovations, fifty paintings from the permanent collection were made available for exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Some of the works on display were acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria… Full Review

It is not farfetched to assume that theoretical reflections on photography will pay close attention to historical perspectives and that histories of photography will take into account theoretical issues. However, Jae Emerling has discovered that hardly any publications on photography have interwoven history and theory in a sustained fashion. Emerling’s Photography: History and Theory demonstrates how insightful this integrated approach can be. This same quality also characterizes Kathrin Yacavone’s Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, also released in 2012. Almost every volume dealing with photography theory discusses the views of both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—often combined with… Full Review

Dichotomies have provided a convenient way to categorize practices and for affiliated architectural groups to contest positions. Prominent dichotomies range from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian to echoes in Kenzo Tange’s Yayoi and Jomon categories relating historic positions to post-World War II modern Japanese architecture, and from continued tensions between notions of modern and traditional as well as global and local. Related contestations shaping architectural production are evident in the Museum of Modern Art’s “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” 1948 debate between modernists, Lewis Mumford, and Bay Area regionalists and more recent postmodern debates between the Whites and Grays… Full Review

Even during the midst of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s meteoric Roman career, questions were raised concerning the singularity and originality of his manner and its impact upon young artists of his own generation. In fact, it was Caravaggio himself, Carlo Cesare Malvasia reports, who was the first to ask why artists adopted his manner, pressing to know to what end Guido Reni had transformed himself into the Lombard painter after seeking out Caravaggio’s paintings for purchase (would that we knew which ones). The flagrant theft of his manner and his coloring, Caravaggio made abundantly clear, could cost the Bolognese painter… Full Review