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When visiting most major art collections in Canada—be it the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—one is likely to encounter the distinctive abstractions created by artists affiliated with “Automatisme,” a Montreal-based modernist movement active during the early 1940s through the 1950s. The Automatistes consisted of a group of young painters who gathered around Paul-Émile Borduas, united by their sympathies for European abstraction and outrage over Montreal’s pervasive cultural and political conservatism. The core of this group included Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Roger Fauteux, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Pierre Gauvreau, Louise Renaud, and Jean-Paul… Full Review

Madness and Modernity is an exceptionally well-conceived group effort that succeeds in avoiding the more speculative generalities often found in studies of “madness and art” in the twentieth century. By tracing the effects of specific contacts and commissions, the book offers a persuasive account of the intermingling of the city’s intellectuals and artists at such modern sites as “the coffeehouse, the cabaret, the sanatorium, and the secession building” (8). The result is a sound defense for including the sanatorium in any list of Vienna’s intriguing new modern attractions. Madness and Modernity originated as a research project begun by Lesley Topp… Full Review

The second half of the sixteenth century in Iran and Turkey brought with it great interest in the art of bibliomancy and the utilization of pictures for prognostication. This is made abundantly clear by the recent splendid exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, which centered around four illustrated manuscripts (three written in Persian, one in Ottoman Turkish) dedicated to the art of divination. These four magnificent books contain a large number of paintings that were the focal point of the exhibition and catalogue. Throughout the show they were referred to as: the Dispersed Falnama, which… Full Review

With this welcome volume, Janet Wolff, author of a number of studies bringing an expanded sociological perspective to the study of the visual arts, delivers a salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. Wolff… Full Review

Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing well into the 1990s, a number of academics, critics, and curators turned to the question of California modernism asking, in short, if there was such a thing and, if so, to what did it owe its unique place in the annals of American art. Anne Bartlett Ayres, Bram Dijkstra, Susan Ehrlich, Paul Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Peter Selz, and Richard Cándida Smith, among others, suggested, in a generous collection of books, essays, and exhibitions that not only did California modern art reveal a distinctive form and content but that it was far closer to… Full Review

Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography significantly updated the chemistry, technology, and aesthetics that The Tamarind Book of Lithography (1971) offered. I am fortunate to have had the chance to introduce both books.To me, then and now, Tamarind represents an “informed energy,” not a tradition built on rote and recipes. The core problem is still the same: how to differentiate what is merely novel from an aesthetic advance of long-term importance. (From the foreword.) —June Wayne Tamarind Techniques for Fine Art Lithography continues the legacy of “informed energy” that June Wayne (founder and director of the Tamarind Institute)… Full Review

Given the increasingly knotty exigencies of scheduling—much less securing and financing loans—it seems all but inevitable that more and more museums will be forced to feature shows culled from the oft-unseen resources of their permanent collections. Such proverbial icebox raiding was evident at the Hirshhorn of late—and to great consequence. Curated by Valerie Fletcher to fill an eleventh-hour programming gap, Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration featured nearly seventy works produced over almost as many years (from a 1917 sketch of workers’ houses to 1973’s comparatively monumental Variants), a number of which had never been exhibited previously. Augmented by select… Full Review

Labor and photography are inseparable. From the muddy newspaper photos of fallen Triangle fire sweatshop workers, to Lewis Hine’s “Icarus” sky boy building the Empire State Building, to Milton Rogovin’s portraits of deindustrialized steelworkers, labor history is partly learned through photographs. In this massive study of the interrelationship of images and farm labor in California, Richard Steven Street excavates a story of struggle, power, endurance, and harsh, dangerous, physical labor. It is a hybrid book—historical, biographical, scholarly, political, critical, technical, multi-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary. Street positions himself among the “three-eye people,” as photographer-historian-activist, both participant and observer. A photographic history of… Full Review

In 1998, Kirk Savage‘s first book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press), was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. His second book, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, should have been a finalist for this year’s general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize, but perhaps it will receive another American Studies award or an art-history honor. Dell Upton, UCLA’s highly respected professor of architectural history, praises this book on its dust jacket as “at once an art history… Full Review

In Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State, Alick McLean presents the disclaimer that medieval Prato should be considered ordinary, at least when compared to its famous neighbors, Florence or Siena. However, by the end of this fascinating, finely researched book, the reader is left feeling that the architectural and urban design (and, ultimately, visual culture) of this Tuscan commune is, simply, extra-ordinary. McLean’s book is a diachronic exploration of the city and architecture of Prato in relation to social, political, and cultural developments, largely from its origin in the Carolingian era until its demise in… Full Review