Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Christine Göttler
Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation. Vol. 2. . Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010. 471 pp.; 25 color ills.; 156 b/w ills. Cloth €130.00 (9782503523972)
Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform by Christine Göttler is an important contribution to the study of Jesuit-sponsored visual culture in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. The artistic style associated with the Counter-Reformation (or the Catholic Reform), usually called the Baroque, was long linked to the Jesuits, so much so that it was dubbed “the Jesuit style” in nineteenth-century German and French art history as a pejorative reference to its propagandistic character. Göttler investigates this issue of control in her study, specifically the question of who is in control of the viewing… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Jean Wirth
Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2010. 416 pp.; 209 color ills. Paper $140.00 (9782600012317)
This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Murat Gül
London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009. 256 pp.; 48 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (9781845119355)
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 346 pp.; 8 color ills.; 154 b/w ills. Cloth $100.00 (9780271027760)
Shirine Hamadeh
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 368 pp.; 8 color ills.; 97 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295986678)
These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review
September 23, 2011
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Todd Porterfield, ed.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 240 pp.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754665915)
Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Jeff Rosenheim
Exh. cat. London: Steidl, 2009. 408 pp.; 400 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9783865218292)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 3, 2009–May 25, 2009
Luc Sante
Portland, OR: Yeti, 2009. 160 pp.; 127 ills. Paper $24.95 (9781891241550)
Since the early 1980s, there has been a small but steady stream of publications on the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of postcards. Some of the most academically rigorous discussions on postcards have dealt with themes of colonialism, tourism, and representations of cultural and racial otherness. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s edited volume Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1998) stand out as two notable examples. Other publications by collectors and historians in the 1980s and 1990s honed in on specific… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Sandra S. Phillips, ed.
San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 256 pp.; 230 color ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300163438)
Exhibition schedule: Tate Modern, London, May 28–October 3, 2010; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 30, 2010–April 17, 2011; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, May 21–September 11, 2011
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the… Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Sheila Dillon
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 238 pp.; 171 b/w ills. Cloth $115.00 (9780521854986)
Sheila Dillon’s Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of Greek portraiture, but focuses on anonymous portraits that cannot be definitively associated with any historical individuals. Dillon neatly eschews vexing questions of specific identity, and the resulting volume is a compelling exploration of formal, theoretical, and contextual issues fundamental to the very genre of portraiture itself. In effect, Dillon disengages from previous preoccupations with individual identification and effectively rescues these mostly anonymous portraits from the general scholarly obscurity in which they have long languished. Dillon rigorously applies methodologies derived from … Full Review
September 15, 2011
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Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed.
Exh. cat. New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010. 496 pp.; 337 color ills.; 116 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780300166576)
Exhibition schedule: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 5, 2010–January 17, 2011; National Gallery, London, February 23–May 30, 2011 (in a reduced version as Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance)
This seminal exhibition, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before traveling to the National Gallery, London, was the first devoted to Jan Gossart in the United States and the first major monographic exhibition anywhere since 1965. The accompanying catalogue, which serves as a catalogue raisonné of the entire oeuvre, re-shapes the contours of this important early sixteenth-century artist and illuminates key questions about his working habits, patronage, and the themes and functions of his art. The exhaustive catalogue entries are prefaced by eight richly informative essays devoted to Gossart’s historical and cultural milieu, his work as an architectural… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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Caroline M. Rocheleau
Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008. 105 pp.; 42 b/w ills. Paper £26.00 (9781407303376)
The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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Kenneth E. Silver
Exh. cat. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010. 200 pp.; 155 color ills. Paper $40.00 (9780892074051)
Exhibition schedule: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011
It is customary to think of European art between the First and Second World Wars in the plural—as defined by competing forms of abstraction, divergent realisms, and assorted returns to tradition. The principal goal of Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 was to assert an underlying unity to the period between the Armistice of 1918 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The chaos and mechanized destruction of World War I, the exhibition and its catalogue affirmed, generated a yearning for the timeless stability embodied by classical art. This provoked a widespread rejection of the formal innovations… Full Review
September 1, 2011
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