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The ancient Mexican civilization traditionally known as the Olmec, approximately 1800–400 BC, left a rich material record of its presence. Yet without written documentation, scholars are left to ponder both the origin of the Olmec and the specific cultural, spiritual, and political significance of the many, primarily stone, works excavated since the nineteenth century. Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, a collaboration between the Instituto Nacional de Antropolgía e Historia, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, curated by Kathleen Berrin and Virginia Fields, included a selection of over 140 Olmec… Full Review

“This is a book of criticism, not theory,” Susie Linfield announces on page xiv. I agree: The Cruel Radiance is not a theoretical book nor is it intended for people working with theories of photography. The targeted audience seems rather to be students of photojournalism concerned with questions about the ethics of looking at war and violence. Professor at the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, Linfield wrote her book, in large part, against the work of Susan Sontag, her “postmodern and poststructuralist heirs,” and their “sour, arrogant disdain for the traditions, the practice, and the ideals… Full Review

When John Addington Symonds described the Renaissance for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he did not mention perspective. Admittedly, the visual arts were rather sweepingly described. But the idea that the Renaissance inaugurated a scientific view of the world came later. Jacques Mesnil in 1927, for instance, described how medieval work had held the observer’s attention by force of the religious subject, and how perspective made it possible to establish a coherence within and beyond the picture space on aesthetic grounds alone. This new device served “to reinforce the unity of the work and to communicate its… Full Review

David Harvey is best known as the author of The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, published in 1989 (London: Blackwell), and a bestseller from the beginning. Without seeking to belittle the role of culture, Harvey underlines in this book that a comprehension of the economic basis of postmodernity is vital to any sound understanding of this phenomenon. A geographer by degree, he turned to social geography after an initial positivist period. He then adopted a more critical and socially oriented stance, with a strong Marxist component. Within this more materialist approach, one of… Full Review

One could hardly say that there is nothing to read on the history of colors, yet one might argue that most of what has been published reiterates a minor litany of sorts, namely, an antagonistic narrative, deeply embedded in the canonical values of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Kant, with recurrent flare-ups crystallised around a few proper nouns that disguise with symmetry the academic hierarchy between drawing and color: Florence and Venice, Poussin and Rubens, Ingres and Delacroix. The long-standing reputation of color as an element resisting quantification, a secondary element emblematic of ineffable quality, has… Full Review

In the summer 2010 issue of Artforum, dedicated to “the museum revisited,” Kathy Halbreich, associate director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, shared the new standards she has brought to the museum’s program, prominent among them a desire to engage actively with “the issues that shape [their visitors’] lives,” enriching the viewer’s experience with “newly relevant” systems of “distribution and display” (Artforum 48, no. 10 [Summer 2010]: 278). Apparently her worthy mandate has not yet penetrated to the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, where the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, organized by Roxana… Full Review

Ann Marie Yasin’s first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community, “explores the intersection between two key developments of the fourth to seventh centuries C.E.: the construction of monumental churches and the veneration of saints.” While it is not based on original excavation or newly discovered documents, the book successfully imposes order and new meanings on a vast array of material that spans the Mediterranean. Why it appears in a series on “Greek Culture in the Roman World” is unclear, given that some sixty percent of its illustrations pertain to North Africa… Full Review

In 2004, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought, for an undisclosed sum that was reported to be more than $45 million, a small panel painting—the so-called Stoclet, or Stroganoff, Madonna—that was widely assumed to have been the last work by Duccio in private hands. Four years later, after a rigorous investigation of the panel, Keith Christiansen, the museum’s curator of European paintings, published an extended essay on the work in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Subsequently, Christiansen’s article was republished as this slender, generously illustrated book. In a way, Christiansen’s book is rather like the painting that… Full Review

In writing Michelangelo’s Vita in 1568, Giorgio Vasari remarked that in his old age the revered sculptor burned many of his drawings, discarding everything he considered less than a perfect creation, thereby destroying any evidence that could have left his monumental greatness in doubt. Although modern scholars frequently question the veracity of Vasari’s anecdotes, this one rings true for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a well-known fact that Michelangelo was an exacting artist, for whom only the finest creations were worth preserving. On the other, and perhaps even more important, one must acknowledge that all artists “edit”… Full Review

Karline McLain’s interdisciplinary study of the premier comic book series in India, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK, founded 1967), masterfully engages in three related projects of import for art history and for South Asian studies. First, her book investigates the reception of popular visual culture, the global transmission of images and visual literacy, the tension between canonized religious texts and the production of images, the appropriation of (high) art for nationalist causes and for popular audiences, and the struggle to put text and image together on a page in the service of an entertaining narrative. Second, she courageously takes on issues… Full Review