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Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar themes. Both privately and in public, painters and sculptors struggled to devise personifications appropriate to the representation of Resistance, Defense, and Defeat. Among the maquettes… Full Review

The Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art has been many things to many people. Designed by Thomas Jeckyll as a dining room with leather walls and intricate shelving, and radically redecorated by James McNeill Whistler in 1876–77, it originally grew around Whistler’s Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–64) and showcased the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of Whistler’s London patron Frederick Leyland. In 1904 it was purchased by Charles Lang Freer and installed in a special wing of his Detroit home. By that point, Freer had already begun to envision the room in his future museum, and it has… Full Review

Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations focuses on the artists associated with the major figures of what the Anglo-Saxon world has called “French Theory,” conceived in a broad way, and corresponding mainly to the 1970s. The various chapters are confrontations between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Lapoujade or Leonardo Cremonini, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Rancillac, Louis Althusser and Lucio Fanti, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gérard Fromanger, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory, Jacques Derrida and Valerio Adami. The goal is to draw attention to these artists, far less known than the thinkers. The relationship then appears… Full Review

The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, published in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, follows those on Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall (2005), and Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humphrey (2008), while two forthcoming volumes will address Naples and Florence. The series is conceived as a broadly contextual account of art of all kinds in Italy, 1300–1600. The key to this approach is patronage. Each of the authors of Court Cities of Northern Italy looks at patrons as… Full Review

The exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan focuses on sculptural fragments from, and the subsequent digital reconstruction of, the Buddhist cave temple site of Xiangtangshan, located in Hebei Province in northern China. The inception of the site dates to the short-lived yet prolific Northern Qi Dynasty (550–577), the subject of the accompanying international conference held at the Freer Gallery on June 3–5, 2011. The name Xiangtangshan may be translated as “Mountain of Echoing Halls.” The name seems fitting, as the exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue examine the site as it reverberated during three distinct historical… Full Review

Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: The Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis was a delightful and instructive exhibition. In one ample room, divided by projecting vitrines and one partial transverse wall, they displayed paintings, drawings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, photographs, and even current wallpaper. Various forms of classical revival became widely acknowledged from the late 1870s onward as the best and truest American expression in architecture and domestic design. Albrecht and Mellins suggested that the catalyst was the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, but they demonstrated that later expositions reinforced and developed ideas… Full Review

There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures. I am trying to engage students who are not necessarily art history or architecture majors and those who are in the class to satisfy some… Full Review

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many writers, such as the economist Stanley Jevons, viewed museums as agents of social reform, but today many scholars have focused on reforming museums and their collecting practices. Specifically, museums’ acquisitions of ancient objects have sparked contentious disputes about these institutions’ responsibilities. These debates are presented in Robin F. Rhodes’s The Acquisition and Exhibition of Classical Antiquities, an edited book of essays from a symposium held at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame on 24 February 2007. This work addresses the collection and display of licit… Full Review

Color—its optical properties, its physiological effects, its natural and human origins, its cultural and emotional associations—has been John Gage’s subject of choice for several decades, and no one has worked in this area more, or more fruitfully, than he. Gage’s most recent book is apparently narrower in scope but turns out to be more comprehensive in its claims than his Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Bulfinch, 1993) and Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Those earlier studies explored the symbolic and practical functions of color throughout… Full Review

David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to what one might expect, he argues, this emergent middle-class aesthetic had its origins not in the city but in the New England countryside—a claim he… Full Review