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The Phillips Collection was recently given a David Smith sculpture, Bouquet of Concaves, and a gestural egg-ink drawing (both 1959). The lateral steel assemblage of irregular metal concave and convex shapes, set atop a slender pole, contrasts with the densely drawn web of staccato black strokes on white paper. Their differences reflect essential aspects of Smith’s yin-yang creative forces, poles vital to understanding the scope of his ambition and achievement. From these seeds, Susan Behrends Frank developed a small but richly textured exhibition using concave and convex forms as visual glue to relate diverse two- and three-dimensional works from… Full Review

As any serious student of the Middle Ages is well aware, an encounter with an illuminated manuscript can be both rewarding and confounding. The variety and complexity of material found within a single codex—or even on a single folio—can defy the expertise of even the most experienced scholar. The contours of current disciplinary guilds fail to encompass the range of interests, knowledge, and abilities of the makers and users of books in the Middle Ages. Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest centers on two folios that serve as a… Full Review

In recent years research and scholarship on limestone as a building material and its use in creating sculpture and decorative elements have taken a quantum leap with large-scale conservation, restoration, and scientific investigations of monuments in Europe. Working in Limestone: The Science, Technology and Art of Medieval Limestone Monuments, edited by Vibeke Olson, is an up-to-date study of medieval monuments and sculpture that focuses primarily on scientific studies in Northern France, England, and Ireland. In twelve papers by specialists, art history and the history of technology are integrated into a comprehensive overview that represents the fruits of sessions sponsored… Full Review

The year 2009 yielded a bumper crop of exhibitions about the art of the Japanese “samurai.” In addition to those documented in the three catalogues reviewed here, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, mounted The Samurai Re-Imagined: From Ukiyo-e to Anime, showing Edo-period woodblock prints alongside contemporary manga comics and anime cels and drawings (but issuing no catalogue). Although the latter catered wholly to popular culture, the other three were far more conventional. But their evident success was surely abetted by the general fascination with the mystique of the “samurai” that is perpetuated precisely by movies, the martial… Full Review

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) were astutely planned as complementary perspectives on the broad contexts for Gertrude Stein’s life and work. The most important aspect of these affiliated exhibitions is the copious interwoven personal, historical, biographical, and legendary stories of this unique literary icon, opening with the Stein family’s roots in the San Francisco Bay Area before shifting to the more expansive narrative of Gertrude’s life and that of her family, expatriates living in… Full Review

“In this book,” Laura Nasrallah writes at the beginning of her impressively erudite study, “I bring together literary texts and archaeological remains to help us to understand how religious discourse emerges not in some abstract zone, but in lived experiences and practices in the spaces of the world” (1). She explores within a deep context of Greek and Roman art and architecture what was at stake in second-century Christian self-representations. Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture is not a broad art-historical study; it focuses on a small number of Christian writers best known for their vitriolic addresses… Full Review

Egypt’s Alexandria was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, but because of the uneven preservation and excavation of its monuments, scholars have been reluctant to undertake a comprehensive study of its architecture. Judith McKenzie’s The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt: 300 BC to AD 700 is a great step in rectifying this, arguing that Alexandria’s importance as a center of architectural innovation cannot be overlooked. McKenzie credits the ancient city’s artisans with a wide variety of architectural and decorative innovations, leading to the creation of an Alexandrian style which spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East and… Full Review

Originally published in French in 2004 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Marta Madero’s study, Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law, offers a provocative glimpse into an important theoretical discourse on painting and writing, a premodern body of thought and argument that remains largely unknown to art historians. Working from medieval and early modern legal glosses and commentaries on the Digest and the Institutes (the code of civil law promulgated by the Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century), Madero’s book examines the tabula picta (painted panel) and its conceptual sibling, the case… Full Review

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s paintings have seduced, repelled, and baffled viewers since the early nineteenth century—sometimes producing all three effects simultaneously. But if Ingres’s work has provoked strong feelings in his viewers, as Susan Siegfried argues in Ingres: Painting Reimagined, it has elicited curiously dull critical interpretations. For many years, Ingres was treated either as a tediously conservative classicist or a simple-minded realist. Feminists reviled him for his treatment of the female figure—nudes polished out of anatomical existence or portraits weighed down with the reified finery of the bourgeoisie—and social historians of art avoided him because his work could not be… Full Review

James M. Dennis, professor emeritus of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of the “improbable” life of The Strike by Robert Koehler, one of the first American paintings to document the tensions between labor and management with detailed precision. “One of my aims in writing this book,” Dennis explains, “has been to provide a historic context to this discourse by restoring to contemporary awareness a quintessentially ‘socially engaged’ work of art produced more than 125 years ago—its origins, its admirers and detractors, its maltreatment, rediscovery, and ultimate transnational apotheosis” (6). Included in the series Studies in… Full Review