Browse Recent Reviews

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) lived long enough to see his role as founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and dissected. Like John Everett Millais, he was later charged with abandoning his early revolutionary artistic goals and pandering to mainstream taste. Hunt’s popularity represented less of a movement away from early idealism than a gradual refinement and elaboration of it, and the public came to love the work that resulted. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition with the same title, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision offers new insights into how this process unfolded in ten essays, which discuss Hunt’s work from… Full Review

Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus… Full Review

The exhibition Picasso Looks at Degas at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened with a statement attributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” That Degas was among those judged worthy of theft—discerned as early as the young Spaniard’s first show in Paris (1901)—was first connected to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Robert Rosenblum (in Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, ed. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher. Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986, 53–60). In Picasso: Style and Meaning (New York: Phaidon, 2002), Elizabeth Cowling opened the way to a broader affiliation by… Full Review

Over the course of a career that spans more than thirty-odd years, Marina Abramović has maintained an unwavering commitment to a form of performance that tests the psychological and physical extremes of the body. The word “commitment” indeed might be the singular most defining characteristic of her art, as well as her approach to the practice of being an artist. Among an early, important group of artists who moved away from the utilization of inert materials in favor of a direct employment of their own bodies (as tool, medium, performer, instigator, facilitator), Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern… Full Review

In Winslow, Arizona, an immigration inspector stopped a consular official and asked him to produce identification. Despite the card provided, the inspector doubted the official’s status and demanded to see a laborer’s certificate, perhaps hoping to verify identification through the photograph that was mandatory on such certificates. Although this scene sounds like it could be taking place today under SB 1070, the exchange occurred in 1903, and the consular official was not of Mexican descent. During the period of Chinese Exclusion in the United States, the government targeted Chinese not only at the borders but within the country’s interior as… Full Review

The portrait, defined here as an accurate physiognomic likeness of an individual rendered in an independent image, has been seen as a clear marker of the differences between the representational strategies and priorities of the medieval period and the modern. Indeed, as Stephen Perkinson notes in his introduction to The Likeness of the King, it is tempting to understand “the introduction of physiognomic likeness as a visual symptom marking the triumph of the self-conscious individual of the Renaissance over the anonymity and corporate identities of the Middle Ages” (6). Perkinson counters this with a detailed exploration of how the… Full Review

A small but impressive exhibition, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting brought twelve drawings and thirteen paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh to the United States for a three-city tour in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Houston. Six of the paintings were from the Bridgewater Collection (on long-term loan to the National Gallery), of which four have been purchased by the museum. In Atlanta (where it was seen by this reviewer), the twenty-five works were well displayed in four galleries, the first devoted to Venetian drawings, the remainder exhibiting a concise history of sixteenth-century Venetian painting with… Full Review

Eve Hesse Spectres 1960 offers a rare opportunity to look and think carefully about one year in an artist’s career, in this case a very early one. E. Luanne McKinnon’s selection of nineteen paintings (all Untitled) from among the four dozen Eva Hesse made in 1960 offers a satisfying range of small studies and larger compositions, and their hanging within a single gallery at the Hammer allows for provocative overlaps and differences to come forward, leading the viewer confidently into the artist’s thought process. The unobtrusive wall texts that accompany some and not others of these so far rarely… Full Review

Diane Wolfthal’s In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe is yet another beautiful book from Yale University Press. It features a delicious picture on the dust jacket cover of a man and a woman fully covered (well, almost—there have to be openings in their clothing somewhere), making love in a beautiful bed, as another couple peeks through a curtain in order to watch. Meanwhile, a cute little dog at the side of the bed turns its head to observe the voyeurs. In other words, we watch the dog watching the couple watching the lovers. Actually… Full Review

This lucid, thoughtful, and remarkably terse study provides extensive insight into a variety of subjects: not only into photography of the Japanese American internment during World War II, but also the functions photography can be made to serve in defining loyalty and security risk in other wars, and the authenticity and force of documentary photography in general. Jasmine Alinder, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, is a sophisticated photography critic able to make complex arguments without the jargon that so often characterizes cultural criticism today. Her book can thus serve as a fine introduction to some of the… Full Review