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

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Joachim Pissarro
Museum of Modern Art, 2005. 256 pp.; 92 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $40.00 (0870701851)
Exhibition schedule: Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 26–September 12, 2005; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 20, 2005–January 16, 2006; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, February 27–May 28, 2006
The Museum of Modern Art’s Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting is the latest in a spate of recent shows focused on the theme of collaboration between a pair of modern artists.[1] Yet even if the theme and subject it proposes to examine is not new, the body of work assembled and shown together for the first time in this retrospective overview of the nearly twenty-year period that Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were in closest dialogue is undeniably impressive.[2] The three-room exhibition presents nearly one-hundred paintings and a few works on paper, all organized more or less chronologically. As… Full Review
January 16, 2006
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Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, eds.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 378 pp.; 95 b/w ills. Cloth $95.00 (0521770076)
This latest volume in the Cambridge Companion series is, at its best moments, at the cutting edge of the state of research on the most famous and fabled personality of the early Renaissance in Italy, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337). A team of authors was assembled by editors Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona—themselves both important contributors to Giotto studies—to address two formidable challenges: to capture the verifiable shreds of documentary evidence of this artist’s life and career and to encapsulate the massive critical record on Giotto as an artist. Derbes and Sandona are to be commended for their bravery, especially… Full Review
January 11, 2006
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David R. Coffin
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 242 pp.; 145 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0271022930)
Best known as the architect of the sprawling Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the charming casino of Pius IV on the grounds of the Vatican, the sixteenth-century polymath Pirro Ligorio has not—until now—been the subject of a general-purpose biography. This is surprising considering the range of his accomplishments; beyond architecture, landscape design, and painting, Ligorio’s talents included cartography, the restoration of antique ruins and sculpture, and collecting (his set of ancient medals and coins was said to be one of the very best in mid-Cinquecento Rome). David Coffin, who spent more than half a century studying Ligorio and published the… Full Review
January 11, 2006
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Pieter Biesboer
Waanders, 2004. 144 pp.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9040090068)
Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, November 27, 2004–April 4, 2005; Kunsthaus Zürich, April 22–August 22, 2005; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 18–December 31, 2005
It is perhaps not surprising that the exhibition of the still lifes of Pieter Claesz. at the National Gallery in Washington is the first monographic show devoted to this artist. As a friend commented on paging through the catalogue, “His works are rather all of a piece, aren’t they?” It is very likely that more than one curator has turned away from the idea of such a show out of concern that the public might find the work too much alike to sustain interest. It is undeniably true that Claesz. devoted most of his career to painting still lifes marked… Full Review
January 10, 2006
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Angela Thirlwell
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 392 pp.; 30 color ills.; 110 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (0300102003)
Edwin Becker, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Julian Treuherz
Exh. cat. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. 248 pp.; 130 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0500093164)
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, October 16, 2003–January 18, 2004; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, February 27–June 6, 2004
In nineteenth-century England, the artistic Rossetti family gave the world poet-painter Dante Gabriel, poet Christina, and William Michael, an art critic and career civil servant. The bohemian Dante Gabriel has inspired numerous biographies and other anecdotal histories, and his sumptuously painted female “stunners” frequently grace the pages of coffee table books and calendars. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a book complementing the 2003–04 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, is the latest publication on this Pre-Raphaelite artist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a picture book and exhibition catalogue given a scholarly gloss through essays by… Full Review
December 19, 2005
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Patricia Fortini Brown
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 32 pp.; 80 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0300102364)
In this well-illustrated and impressively documented volume, Patricia Fortini Brown presents a new kind of history of the Venetian Renaissance home. Unlike most prior studies of domestic architecture, furnishings, and the decorative arts (not often discussed together), this volume reunites architecture with lived experience, form with function, and aesthetic choices with their broader societal implications. Fortini Brown is a masterful social as well as art historian, and her analysis of what it meant to be noble in sixteenth-century Venice prepares the reader for a highly nuanced reading of the palaces that line the Grand Canal. Alert to the paradoxes inherent… Full Review
December 16, 2005
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Jean Frémon and Antoni Tàpies
Exh. cat. Klosterneuberg, Austria: Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung, 2005.
Sammlung Essl: Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, June 24, 2005–October 23, 2005
In this exhibition, Klosterneuburg’s Essl Collection—dedicated since 1995 to the dissemination of contemporary art—brings the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies and the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer together for the first time, thereby creating a unique encounter between their respective oeuvres. Conceived by collector Karlheinz Essl, whose collection contains most of the ninety-plus works on display, the exhibition was curated by Jean Frémon, a co-director of Paris’s Galerie Lelong and a long-time follower of both artists’ careers The exhibition sets out to explore the echoes and convergences, not necessarily intentional, between the two artist’s oeuvres and their lives. Formal relationships and echoes… Full Review
December 16, 2005
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Hiroko Johnson
Boston: Hotei Publishing, 2005. 176 pp.; 57 ills. Cloth $116.00 (9074822649)
Hiroko Johnson has produced the first English-language monograph on the small group of elite men from Akita who, in the free and open days of Tanuma Okitsugu’s period as shogunal chief counselor, embarked on the challenge of integrating Western art practice into that of Japan. Her book is beautifully produced, with the lavish use of photographs and plates associated with Hotei Publishing. Johnson tells the story thoughtfully and intelligently, and even those who consider themselves informed on the subject will still find a great deal of new information here. Johnson has gone through all available publications, and examined all the… Full Review
December 15, 2005
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Maurice Samuels
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 296 pp.; 14 b/w ills. Paper $24.95 (0801489652)
Why did spectacular representations of recent history become all the rage in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century? How did this new approach to picturing the past help the fractured French nation to forge a unified identity? And why did cultural critics of all political persuasions, including Realist novelists such as Balzac and Stendhal, find the trend so troubling? Maurice Samuels, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, offers persuasive answers to these and related questions in his compelling first book Although its subtitle emphasizes contributions to the field of French literature, The… Full Review
December 12, 2005
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Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides, eds.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. 286 pp.; 78 b/w ills. Cloth $120.00 (0754608077)
When Giorgio Vasari wrote in the 1568 edition of the Lives that Michelangelo had surpassed the ancients, art, and nature itself, he codified a familiar characterization that had already been current in critical commentaries and published letters for decades. Michelangelo was, of course, the hero of Vasari’s history, and it was therefore inevitable that in his construction of the progressive perfection of art, Michelangelo represented an exemplar of inimitable perfection. But, however politically and ideologically motivated Vasari’s Lives may be as a work of critical theory and literary biography, there is also a great deal of truth in what he… Full Review
December 7, 2005
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