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Tracing the development and transformation of Japanese design amidst larger social contexts—such as rapid economic growth and the shift in Japan’s standing within the world after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, the first world’s fair held in Asia—is challenging. Ory Bartal takes on the task of understanding this development by examining design as a form of protest and identity making that addressed social issues linked to both global and local concerns for Japanese designers and consumers in the final decades of the twentieth century. Bartal’s research on Japanese design and visual culture culminated in his… Full Review

Yi Gu’s Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting provides a revisionist history of Chinese landscape painting from the early 1910s to the late 1960s. Foregrounding the importance of visual perception to modern Chinese art, Gu locates an “ocular turn” in landscape painting circa 1911 that shifted premodern Chinese painters’ preoccupation with the literary to a modern artistic subjectivity anchored in visual perception. This ascendancy of vision occurred when Republican-period painters, anxious to establish themselves as modern subjects, embraced open-air painting as a practice that underscored direct observation, linear perspective, and a pseudoscientific means to view the world. Continuing to… Full Review

The Cranbrook Art Museum is a fitting home for this retrospective exhibition of the decades-long explorations of material, color, and form by the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral (b. 1932 in Bogotá). The exhibition was organized by Anna Walker, assistant curator of decorative arts, craft, and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show originated, and Laura Mott, senior curator of contemporary art and design at Cranbrook Art Museum. It was here, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1954, that Olga de Amaral first tried her hand at weaving. As she describes in a recent interview… Full Review

The scholarship on nineteenth-century photography has long been preoccupied with nationality, origin stories, and technical innovations. Makeda Best charts a different path. In her important new book, we are introduced to Alexander Gardner not as Civil War or western-survey documentarian, not as the favorite portraitist of President Abraham Lincoln or the force behind Mathew Brady’s studio, and not as entrepreneur or experimenter or defender of intellectual property. He may be all of these things, but he is first a Scottish liberal deeply involved in the global reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, a vocal advocate of workers’ rights, and a… Full Review

Any art historian who has conducted field research at early modern churches in Latin America and the southwestern United States knows that ecclesiastical textiles constitute an important portion of the Spanish colonial patrimony preserved in such sites. Yet these pieces are for the most part underappreciated and understudied, with very few scholarly works throwing light on their technical, aesthetic, and functional qualities. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s Clothing the New World Church provides the first in-depth and hemispheric study of such pieces, a good portion of which reveal the ways in which Native American ideas and practices intertwined with European crafts and beliefs… Full Review

Bob Thompson (1937–1966), an artist from Louisville, Kentucky, who participated in the Provincetown and New York art worlds of the late 1950s before embarking on extensive periods spent in London, Paris, Ibiza, and Rome, lived a brief but prolific life as a painter. He died in 1966 at the age of twenty-nine. Thompson’s work, with its distinctive motifs (a hatted man, mysterious birds, figures set in lush and ambiguous chromatic landscapes, and transformed quotations of art historical paintings), flowered in the eight years This House Is Mine covers, from 1958 until 1966. The show takes its title from a small… Full Review

The publication of Anne Derbes’s lavishly illustrated book on the baptistery of Padua is a welcome and timely contribution, both for this building and the city. Recently inserted in the UNESCO World Heritage List (Padova Urbs Picta) because of its late fourteenth-century frescoes by Giusto de’Menabuoi (1320–1391), the baptistery is now free of scaffolding following the two-year restoration of its wall paintings and altarpiece. Fina Buzzacarini’s tomb canopy has also been restored, allowing us to distinguish between carved elements that were subsequently painted and painting that mimicks carving. Indeed an observer from the ground can see that only… Full Review

Arrested Welcome is a thematically organized set of case studies on the strategies of hospitality in contemporary artists’ projects. Aristarkhova defines “hospitality” as “the practice of welcoming others” (xv), with collective potential extending from individual encounters. According to Aristarkhova, acts and forms of hospitality are used by artists “to bring back its original promise of a democratic, indiscriminate, unconditional welcome” (65). At the same time, Aristarkhova is clear about the problems with extrapolating social change from individual artistic practices. She notes that “individual welcoming acts do not solve big structural problems” (xviii), remarks that “it is problematic to act out… Full Review

In the past decade more scholars have abandoned an understanding of history based on contemporary political borders to embrace an understanding centering on the historical entanglement of empires. Such entanglement has resulted in our present power relations among nations in the Americas. Art historian M. Elizabeth Boone’s “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” is an example of this shift in historical approaches, which complements work by scholars such as April Lee Hatfield, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Katherine Manthorne, and Maggie M. Cao. More significantly, with its emphasis on the history of world’s fairs, this book creates a narrative where technology, art, science… Full Review

In a reappraisal of German modernism, Robin Schuldenfrei’s Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900–1933 highlights issues of taste, class, and luxury in modern German design and interiors, ultimately underscoring a necessary distinction between objects actually suited to mass production and handcrafted objects made with a modern, mass-produced aesthetic. Schuldenfrei examines the tensions of the Bauhaus, which was founded on progressive principles but ultimately fell short of producing financially accessible products, instead reaching an elite class of consumers. The book’s introduction considers the retouching of a seemingly prosaic photograph taken by Lucia Moholy for the 1930 book… Full Review