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The Victoria and Albert Museum’s show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 is an attempt to survey postmodernism as a design strategy rather than an epoch or paradigm of contemporary culture. Of course these elements prove difficult to separate, especially with regard to such a loaded term, employed by so many with intentions vast and diverse. The subtitle of the exhibition, Style and Subversion, is therefore important in its signal toward artistic innovation as a platform from which to think through poignant social and cultural transitions undertaken at the hands of architects, artists, and designers in a move away from… Full Review

As I entered the art galleries of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a boy, maybe eight years old, sat leaning into his father. They were watching, intently, Will Rogan's video One Thing I Can Tell You Is You've Got to Be Free (2000). A quirky, deadpan ode to the art spirit, the six-minute loop sets an unpretentious tone for the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection. In each of a series of eighteen vignettes, an object in motion—a bouncing ball, a paper airplane, a tossed shoe—flies into the frame toward an improbable target and makes a perfect landing. The… Full Review

Transition periods in art history rarely present straightforward theses, and eighteenth-century South Asia is no exception. In the recent past this period was characterized more eloquently in terms of its failure rather than its success, as a cultural gulf stretching between waning Mughal power and an encroaching British one. Art historians have viewed this political crisis of the Mughal state as a corollary of an artistic crisis of style and composition—a primary concern being the dissolution of a unifying stylistic and cultural vision, the hallmark of the early modern Mughal atelier. Yet, as this book argues, when viewed from the… Full Review

Lloyd Laing’s survey of art in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland from the Iron Age to the conversion period opens with an introductory chapter entitled "The Study of Celtic Art." It then provides an overview in the following chapter, "Pre-Christian Insular Celtic Art," exploring both the motifs and the media of metalwork and examining interactions with the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, ending with a consideration of the Mote of Mark as a site of cultural interaction. Chapter 3, "The Impact of Christianity," looks at the structure of the Celtic church, the role of monasticism, and the development of Insular Christian iconography… Full Review

The tronie—a head or character study—is not a portrait; tronies figure the anonymous as opposed to the recognized, the pathos of expression rather than the portrait’s posed veneer. The tronie and its precise relation to the academic genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life has been the subject of recent scholarly attention. The slippery pictorial genre first appeared in the sixteenth century as a workshop exercise designed to teach young apprentices the fundamentals of drawing and chiaroscuro. A tronie may also mimic a particular master’s style; thus it became a popular and marketable form in the seventeenth… Full Review

Adam Kern's Manga from the Floating World analyzes the literary genre of kibyōshi (literally, "yellow covers"), providing a particular focus on the subversive effects these small, fully illustrated works of humor had on the ruling military bureaucracy in late eighteenth-century Japan. The book is rich in detail and written in a style that is engaging, informative, and entertaining. Kern has a penchant for taking standard phrases and morphing them into something ironic, as in his title for chapter 4, "The Rise and Pratfall of the Kibyōshi." A further distinctive feature is that the study follows what is now standard… Full Review

The Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference (CABC), organized by the CABC committee of art library professionals, was held free of charge and open to the public on September 30 and October 1, 2011, during Printed Matter’s sixth annual NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (http://nyartbookfair.com/conference). The conference consisted of six panel sessions lasting ninety minutes each, along with an hour-long lightning round of ten presenters discussing and showing images of their favorite zines, books, or multiples within a five-minute time frame. The well-attended sessions were held in a conference room on the first floor of the MoMA PS1… Full Review

Marcia Hall has written a brave book that is even more sweeping in scope than the list of names in the subtitle suggests. Indeed, the first half of the book discusses the Council of Trent, fifteenth-century Florentine religious painting, the Venetian use of oil paint, the Reformation, Leonardo, Giorgione, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mannerism, and Roman painting at the end of the century. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, however, is not a survey, but a lucid argument, focusing on a few examples over this broad swathe of Renaissance art in order to explore a question of signal… Full Review

“To the Romans I assign no limit of things nor of time. To them I have given empire without end” (Aeneid, 1.278). So Virgil’s Zeus prophesized to Aeneas, encapsulating the myth of Rome’s divinely sanctioned and immortal imperium (power, authority, and sovereignty) that inspired and was exploited by centuries of later rulers, popes, nobles, humanists, and others. Rome’s imperium—how it was expressed by its ancient ruins and fragments and who could possess it during the Renaissance—forms the central theme in Kathleen Wren Christian’s book. Christian examines the cultural phenomenon of antiquities collecting in Rome during the early… Full Review

During the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Perriand and Sonia Delaunay both sought to transform the field then known as the decorative arts by applying the formal innovations of modernism and the industrial innovations of capitalist production to the design and manufacture of domestic objects. The two women were roughly contemporaries, formed by the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the wars, and both are now seen most often through the lens of feminist art history, which is in part responsible for recovering their work from obscurity. Two concurrent exhibitions—one in Paris devoted to Perriand and one in New York surveying Delaunay—offered… Full Review