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Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review

The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review

Auguste Rodin enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Great Britain, relishing the company of admiring patrons and fellow artists and exhibiting his work to laudatory reviews. Shortly before his death, he donated eighteen sculptures to the state—the only such donation he made during his lifetime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the British have honored his work in grand retrospectives, including two organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Hayward Gallery in 1970 and 1986. In the fall of 2006, the Royal Academy of Arts continued the British romance with Rodin, mounting a new comprehensive… Full Review

In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review

Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of… Full Review

This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings. Historical highlights are amply celebrated as Nehamas explores the place of beauty in… Full Review

The first work of Olafur Eliasson’s that one encounters upon entering the atrium lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is an ordinary fan swinging wildly just overhead. Mesmerizing and a bit menacing at the same time, the work, titled Ventilator (1997), serves as an introduction to a series of meticulously choreographed interactive installations that comprise the artist’s first major U.S. survey exhibition. I experienced a similar sense of heightened awareness when I visited Eliasson’s exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris five years ago. There, I had to cross a carpet of lava… Full Review

In 2006 Yale University Press published an English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s last book—fourteen years after the Italian original and twelve years after the death of its author. Why? Admittedly Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was both famous and controversial in the Anglo-Saxon world. Famous because of the incredibly wide range of his knowledge and his refined scholarship, controversial because of his Marxist views and his preference for urban development over individual works of architecture. In Europe Tafuri was mainly known as a notoriously “difficult” author whose theoretical and historical essays were equally dark and impenetrable. Said an Italian architect: “Tafuri… Full Review

John Pedley has conceived Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World as a college-level introduction to Greek sanctuaries and their place in ancient Greek society. Particular emphasis is given to the natural and built appearance of sanctuaries, to the works of visual arts populating those spaces, to the visual experiences of visitors, to the ritual activities, and to the transformations of sanctuaries over time, from their origins up to the present. After outlining the main themes of the book, Pedley sketches a general introduction to the nature and development of sanctuaries from the Geometric period to the… Full Review

A Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting: The Art of Lin Fengmian was jointly organized by the Shanghai Art Museum and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The long-awaited exhibition consisted of paintings from the two museums as well as private collections. On display were the artist’s paintings from the 1930s to the 1980s. This retrospective presented Lin’s technical virtuosity and innovative spirit and reaffirmed his artistic authority in twentieth-century Chinese art. Lin Fengmian was born in 1900 in Guangdong province in China. He started his formal education locally and later went to Shanghai and joined a study program that… Full Review