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Performance, which can be generically described as the enactment of a ceremony, ritual, play, or work of music, dance, or visual art, has only recently been explored as an interpretive framework in medieval studies. Tracing its origins to research undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s, performance theory crystallized as a distinctive interdisciplinary field in the 1980s and 1990s, encompassing anthropology, art history, communication arts, critical gender studies, ethnic studies, film studies, linguistics, literature, and theater studies. Although performance can be construed as adhering to an orderly structure, recent scholarship has emphasized its liminality, its capacity to cross boundaries and resist… Full Review

Mounted by the Petit Palais in collaboration with the City of Paris’s Musée de la Vie Romantique, William Blake: The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism—featuring over 150 works borrowed from major British collections, the Louvre, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others—was the first French retrospective devoted to Blake since 1947. This overdue exhibition was expansive and thorough, if not inspirational; it was beautifully installed in the Petit Palais’s well-appointed special exhibition rooms, but the roughly thematic groupings were at times opaque or barely articulated. Arguably, Blake is as much a poet as a visual artist, and… Full Review

I think the most beautiful thing about modern art is that it has built into its own potential the capacity for destroying itself —Robert Barry (1969) The Quick and the Dead is an exhibition that starts with a spur of a title. Branded beneath it in gold, a pair of triangles are carefully stacked tip-to-tip, one up, one down, in the shape of an hourglass, similar perhaps to a Möbius strip. It eventually becomes clear that this icon is something of a curatorial signature, for it not only conjures the categories of time and space that govern… Full Review

The rediscovery of the Chicagoan began in a classic moment of scholarly serendipity, when Neil Harris happened on the magazine in the stacks of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, one of only two institutions with a complete set of issues. Research revealed that the magazine, published between 1926 and 1935, truly had been lost, along with a record of many of its contributing writers and artists. Part history, part sampler, and thoroughly readable, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age goes a long way toward restoring that record and giving it a context in the history of… Full Review

It is unusual for major “Western” museums to host simultaneous exhibitions involving the arts of the Islamic world, and more unusual still for any such Islamic art exhibitions to cover similar regions and historical periods or concern related themes. While the overlap of the two shows on view in London and Washington may have resulted from a scheduling fluke, it perhaps also reflects the growing commitment of European and North American museums both to highlighting Muslim arts and cultures within their collection, exhibition, and education programs (also evident in the number of institutions from New York to Paris to Copenhagen… Full Review

In his pioneering study Understanding Media of 1964, Marshall McLuhan credited Alexis de Tocqueville with discovering in the French Revolution evidence that “the medium is the message.” The “highly literate aristocrat,” wrote McLuhan, had recognized that the Revolution would never have happened had print culture not unified the nation, enabling the conditions for a national uprising (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, 14–15). Typography had homogenized France. In contrast, England’s entrenched feudal traditions and the discrete complexities of its oral culture had immunized the nation from the standardizing effects of print and the… Full Review

In the course of the eighteenth century, European artists, architects, travelers, and scholars broke from narrow Renaissance conventions and cast fresh eyes on the material and literary remains of classical antiquity. The repertoire of models available to designers and theorists was widened by the study and publication of ancient sites in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the Near East, while ancient authors such as Homer, Pausanias, Strabo, and Virgil were reevaluated through on-site comparisons of texts and landscapes. The discovery of previously marginal or underappreciated art forms such as Roman frescos and Greek vase painting resulted in a new understanding of… Full Review

Matthew Simms’s Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting proposes to restore Paul Cézanne’s watercolors to their rightful position of importance in the painter’s oeuvre as well as demonstrate the meaning they held for the artist. Supporting Simms's argument is a lush presentation of the watercolors, magnificently displayed in full-page color plates and enlarged details. The book’s text is woven around a few key ideas: that for Cézanne watercolor was an autonomous form of expression, a separate category, a “mixed medium” that stood independently and in its own right between the separate worlds of drawing and oil painting; that Cézanne used… Full Review

In 1942, Laurence Vail Coleman, then president of the American Association of Museums, sought to define the special nature of the campus museum: “The campus museum should be, above all, an instrument of teaching or research, or of both.” And, he wrote, “the first duty of a university or college museum is to its parent establishment, which means that the faculty and student body have a claim prior to that of townspeople and outsiders in general.”[1] In College and University Museums: A Message for College and University Presidents, Coleman addressed not only art museums but natural history, anthropology, and… Full Review

Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s book on Cairene Mamluk architecture has been eagerly anticipated. Well worth the wait, it is informed throughout by an encyclopedic knowledge of the sources, both from contemporary chronicles and waqf (endowment) documents, allied to a lifetime’s acquaintance with the monuments and to art-historical expertise of the highest order. The book is essentially divided into two parts: the first focuses on a variety of historical and art-historical topics; the second examines key buildings. The arrangement of topics in the first part allows Behrens-Abouseif to take a number of different approaches to Mamluk architecture. The first chapter lays out… Full Review