Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Reviews

Paula Nuttall
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288 pp.; 80 color ills.; 150 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300102445)
Even today, in an age of virtual realities, it is difficult to view Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Canon van der Paele of 1436 without being shaken by it. The level of illusionism attained in this picture is, bluntly put, mind-boggling. Jan has rendered an entirely credible interior space—cropped on all four sides by the sides of the painting—receding behind the picture plane and ending at a distance that appears measurable. This fictive space, representing the choir of a Romanesque church with an ambulatory wrapped around it, is occupied by figures that are three-dimensional in all but actuality. There are… Full Review
March 8, 2006
Thumbnail
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Brigette Salmen, and Karole Vail
New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2005. 300 pp. Cloth $60.00 (0892073276)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 20–August 10, 2005; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, and Schlossmuseum, Murnau, September 8, 2005–January 15, 2006; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, May 4–July 30, 2006
Thalia Vrachopoulos and John Angeline
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. 107 pp.; 16 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (0773462554)
Hilla Rebay’s life lends itself to biography. Rebay (1890–1967) was a colorful and controversial figure in the transatlantic art world, a modern woman well connected in avant-garde and society circles. As narratives about her life convey, she had first-hand knowledge of movements such as Jugendstil, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and trends in abstraction. Rebay was ambitious, and that drive resulted in the formation of a world-renowned assemblage of works by Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Chagall, and Moholy-Nagy—to name but a few of the modern masters—that would become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection. But it was her role as artist—modernist and portrait… Full Review
March 8, 2006
Thumbnail
Thumbnail
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
New York: Phaidon, 2005. 448 pp.; 240 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (0714841579)
Something there is that doesn’t love the survey of art history textbook. Just as with Robert Frost’s more pentametric unloved wall, everyone has a different opinion of just what it should keep in, or keep out. It’s a statistical fact that very few of the many aspiring tomes published in this category succeed in being accepted as required reading in big-enrollment introductory courses, thus rewarding underpaid professors with long-term royalty income. Even more discouraging to the hopeful authors, and unlike the never irrelevant and always assignable monograph even when out of print, the survey text once remaindered is no longer… Full Review
March 1, 2006
Thumbnail
The themes of parent-child relationships, migration, and colonialism resonate throughout the exhibition spaces of the two-pronged Venice Biennale, as well as in the national pavilions. Curated by María de Corral, the Experience of Art at the Giardini and the Italian Pavilion joins forces with Always a Little Further, curated by Rosa Martínez at the Arsenale, to engage visitors in an overall exhibition that cuts across several countries and time periods. Despite the often incongruous juxtapositions, viewers can self-curate a selection of works, making the overwhelming Biennale a more manageable exhibition. What follows is this reviewer’s attempt at lending some… Full Review
March 1, 2006
Michael Stolleis and Ruth Wolff, eds.
Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004. 377 pp.; 80 b/w ills. Paper (3484670169)
In the middle of the last century, Nicola Ottokar (“Criteri d’ordine, di regolarità e d’organizzazione nell'urbanistica ed in genere nella vita fiorentina dei secoli xiii-xiv,” Archivio storico italiano 98.1, 1940: 101–106) and Wolfgang Braunfels (Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana, Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1953) demonstrated the fruitfulness of consulting the statutes of medieval Italian cities for insights into their urban form. Although art historians have continued to mine these sources in the intervening years, the last decade has brought an explosion of new research not only on medieval and Renaissance urbanism in Italy but also in the history of… Full Review
March 1, 2006
Thumbnail
Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch
National Gallery of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2005. 371 pp.; 177 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (0300113390)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 4–November 27, 2005; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, December 14, 2005–March 19, 2006
When Peter Parshall authored his standard work, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (with David Landau; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), critical readers noted one significant omission: the earliest century of woodcuts before the generation of Albrecht Dürer. Perhaps it was because those works offered stark outlines and relatively little interior modeling, though they frequently were also colored to enhance their naturalism. Now the missing link has been forged. Drawing from extraordinary holdings of this material in their respective museums, Parshall and Schoch provide the first real study of early woodcuts since Arthur Hind in 1935 (though Richard Field, who contributes… Full Review
February 17, 2006
Thumbnail
Victoria Weston
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. 371 pp.; 27 color ills.; 53 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (1929280173)
Japanese Painting and National Identity: Okakura Tenshin and His Circle describes the efforts of art theorist and educator Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) to develop a national painting style in Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912). It focuses on the ways in which that goal manifested itself in the educational institutions and painting themes and styles he was involved in creating in association with his collaborator Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908). Victoria Weston’s extensive research, coupled with her concise writing style, places Okakura and his group within the heightened consciousness of national identity that defines the Meiji era and adds depth to an understanding… Full Review
February 17, 2006
Thumbnail
David M. Lubin
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 355 pp.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $24.95 (0520229851)
The image world of the Kennedy era is so ripe for critical reexamination that after reading David Lubin’s innovative study I kept wondering why it took this long to be tackled. Between JFK’s orchestrated rise to the limelight in the early 1950s and unexpected yet captured-on-camera murder in November 1963, could one find a better turning point in modern U.S. history than the second, neo-Camelot decade of Cold War America? In the tradition of Fitzgerald, many eulogize the period as the end of American innocence, while a disenchanted minority leans toward Malcolm X’s judgment of “the chickens coming home to… Full Review
February 17, 2006
Thumbnail
Elizabeth C. Childs
New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 252 pp.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth $68.95 (0820469459)
Elizabeth Childs’s Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign should appeal to a wide variety of readers, from the Honoré Daumier specialist to the undergraduate student of nineteenth-century art. Supplementing previous scholarly work on Daumier and on mid-nineteenth-century caricature and press censorship, including Judith Wechsler’s consideration of the significance and interpretation of physical characteristics in A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Childs’s own case study of the suppression of freedom of expression in “Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature” (Art Journal… Full Review
February 6, 2006
Thumbnail
Thomas Heyd and John Clegg, eds.
Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. 316 pp.; 106 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (075463924X)
At the beginning of the twenty-first century it seems that history might be repeating itself with a call to a return to aesthetics. Not so much the aesthetics of the philosophers as the domain of the aesthetic itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century philosophical aesthetics had run out of steam: the German idealists had made themselves too remote from the practice of art to be of any use to art history. Alois Riegl felt that aesthetics had to be done again, this time from art. Max Dessoir felt that a united effort had to be made by psychologists… Full Review
February 6, 2006
Thumbnail