Browse Recent Reviews

This ambitious, two-volume catalogue of sixteenth-century drawings in Midwestern American collections is the second in a series sponsored by the Midwest Art History Society. The first installment in the series treated drawings datable before 1500 (Drawings in Midwestern Collections, Volume I, Early Works, A Corpus Compiled by the Midwest Art History Society, Burton L. Dunbar and Edward J. Olszewski, eds., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), and the final volume will consider drawings from the Carracci into the eighteenth century. The sixteenth-century catalogue provides a valuable resource for scholars by illustrating and cataloguing an impressive 471 drawings from… Full Review

BEFORE I’ve decided on the odd but I think appropriate approach of starting to write about Tino Sehgal before seeing the exhibition because so much discussion and disclosure has taken place about it, a lot of it on web-based networking sites such as Facebook and art sites such as Artnet, and most of it in reaction to Sehgal's efforts to control "the situation" and his brand. This discourse is part of the total experience of a project that for some is important, even transformative of the nature of art, precisely insofar as it produces discussion, not in and of… Full Review

The Art Institute of Chicago and Saint Louis Art Museum recently organized a visually rich exhibition featuring thirty-two Japanese folding-screen compositions from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Sporting a different title at each location, the exhibition brought together the best of both collections and smartly used the diverse works to present a multi-faceted introduction to the folding screen. The two museums fashioned surprisingly different viewing experiences. With illustrated, bilingual gallery texts, detailed individual labels, and a looping video on a contemporary work that periodically sent classical bugaku music reverberating throughout its high-ceilinged galleries, the Art Institute offered abundant… Full Review

Childhood often conjures images of an idyllic time of innocence and bliss. Although captivating to the popular imagination, such visions are by no means timeless or universal, and perhaps nothing more than nostalgic conceit. This is where the curators of Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood, April Watson and Jane Aspinwall, intervened by assembling a variety of photographic images of children, dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Of the forty-four photographers represented, most were American, save for Brits Lewis Carroll and Cecil Beaton, the German photographer August Sander, the Italian-born Frederick Sommer and Jocelyn Lee, and the Japanese… Full Review

Among cross-disciplinary connections, perhaps none is so elusive, so fraught with traps, as the boundary between history and art history. It is a boundary all the more striking for its invisibility. Art historians typically assume that they are partaking in historical study, that the tools they bring to cultural artifacts from the past illuminate an understanding comparable to that of their historian colleagues. All the greater their surprise, then, when they attend a history seminar or delve into historical journals and discover that their colleagues actually speak a different language and reach sometimes strikingly unfamiliar conclusions. Confusion and misunderstanding can… Full Review

In The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934, Kristina Wilson examines the various rhetorical, cultural, and curatorial framing devices through which highly influential New York museums and galleries actively engaged in audience-building for modern American art during a pivotal inter-war decade. Throughout this beautifully illustrated and fascinating volume, Wilson explores the culturally resonant themes and strategies that united the otherwise diverse activities of Alfred Stieglitz and his later circle (chapter 1); the curators and trustees who organized The Architect and the Industrial Arts exhibition (1929) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (chapter 2); the… Full Review

Catalogue raisonnés are always long projects, running into decades, and often the life's work of their authors. Patrick Noon's Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings is no exception, written painstakingly over three decades. The volume is very well illustrated, and the meticulous and complete catalogue entries form a continuation of Noon's exhibition catalogue from 1991, Richard Bonington: On the Pleasures of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press). Since that time, Noon has discovered archival material and has translated letters by Bonington's traveling companion, Charles Rivet. The few earlier studies on Bonington range from reliable to full of errors and misattributions… Full Review

In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with… Full Review

An intriguing concept lies behind this anthology: in 1999, a group of graduate students under the direction of Yves Christe in Geneva began the systematic comparison of the iconography of the Bibles moralisées and the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. In 2001, their results were presented along with other scholarship on the Sainte-Chapelle at an international colloquium organized by Christe and Peter Kurmann at the Collège de France. Four contributors from the Geneva project (Christe, as well as Christine Hediger, who also edited the volume and wrote its preface, Stanislas Anthonioz, and Maya Grossenbacher) are joined in this… Full Review

The History of British Art, Volume 1: 600–1600 is the first of an ambitious new three-volume series produced by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain. Edited by Tim Ayers, this volume is, temporally at least, the most ambitious of the three, covering the period of the conversion of Britain under Augustine around 600 AD to a rather more difficult period to account for, ca. 1600. The latter date—which denies the normal boundary for the British Middle Ages with the Dissolution of the Monasteries—does much to challenge still prevalent historiographical problems surrounding the inexact relationship between the periodization… Full Review